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Moving to Blog-City

Issue 144

From Issue #144
April 2006

Feb 23, 2006  By Dee-Ann LeBlanc
 in
Blog-City.com is a Linux-based feature-rich blogging community that delivers a robust and heavily-customizable blogging experience.
It's All about Looks

Most people want to get their blog looking the way they want it before they start to enter content. To do this, click the Look'n'Feel tab to change to the Main Blog Layout page (Figure 5). Here, you see a visual representation of your layout with labels in place. Those that are clickable are items you can change. Those that aren't are for premium accounts.

Figure 5. The Blog-City Main Blog Layout Page

The links along the left of this page are:

  • Main Blog Layout: the layout chart you're looking at now.

  • Custom Home Page: premium-only—lets you design a new layout chart completely from scratch.

  • Layout Style—lets you choose how the page should be laid out from a list of templates. Premium users get many more layout options.

  • Theme Editor: lets you change your page's theme.

  • Menu Editor: premium-only—lets you create menus to appear on your site that can be used for navigation purposes.

  • Bookmarks: lets you create bookmarked links and organize them.

  • Visitor Polls: premium-only—lets you create polls to be added as portlets.

  • News Feeds: premium-only—lets you set what RSS feeds to subscribe to, and then display it in a subset page (such as kleekai.blog-city.com/newsfeed), or in a portlet.

  • Custom Portlets: premium-only—lets you create and manage portlets of your own using the HTML editor window.

  • Blog Board: lets you access your Blog Board (portlet where users can leave quick messages or chat) content, clear it out or set delays on when comments will appear.

  • Neighborhood: premium-only—lets you create a subpage (such as kleekai.blog-city.com/neighborhood) that contains a list of other blogs you track. You can mark this page to be linked off of your main page.

  • eBAY Listing: premium-only—lets you show the latest items for sale in particular categories or by particular users.

The links within the chart are:

  • Edit the blog's META data: premium-only—opens a window letting you set the META tags for your blog.

  • Edit your main blog header: opens a window (Figure 6) that lets you edit the top of your blog page. Start by changing the Page Title, which you probably want to make a bit more expressive than just the single-word term in your blog's name. Mark how you want the header to behave in the drop-down list box, and then below the formatting buttons, enter the rest of what you would like to appear on the top of each page. This box and its WYSIWYG formatting tools essentially will be the same no matter where you're modifying content for the site. If you prefer to work with raw HTML, click the Source button on the top left. If you want to see the changes, click Save Details and then, on the main page, click the blog name to open your blog as discussed earlier.

  • Edit the options for your main home page: opens the Home Page Options dialog box, which lets you set particular behavior features for the blog.

  • Edit the blog entry options: opens the Edit Blog Entry Options dialog box, which lets you set behaviors for all of your blog posts.

  • Edit your main blog footer: premium-only—opens the Blog Footer window, letting you set what appears at the bottom of every blog page.

  • Insert Portlet: portlets are the fancy widgets along the side of your blog. Click Insert Portlet to tell the administration console that you want to insert a new portlet at the exact position you chose, and it opens an Insert a new portlet dialog box. If you want to move a portlet up or down, click the up or down button in its box within the chart. To remove a portlet, click the X in its box. Premium subscribers have a much longer list of portlets they can use than free subscribers do.

Figure 6. The Blog-City Blog Header Page

Because so many people like to customize blog themes, it's worth discussing how to do so in Blog-City. Choose Look'n'Feel -< Theme Editor to access the proper page. Here, you can preview existing themes available to all Blog-City members by going to the Community Themes section and choosing one of the themes in the list, or you can click the right or left arrows to cycle through the list of themes. If a theme appears as only a white box, it is available, there is simply no preview. When you find a theme you want to use, click Use This Theme. Then, in the Save Theme section above, click the check box for Make this theme my live/public theme, and click Save Current Theme. Load your blog and you will see the new theme has been put into place.

If you want, you can choose a theme to use as a base and then edit its contents. To do this, follow the instructions just given, but then in the Your Themes section, choose the theme from the drop-down list box and click Load Theme. Once you have done this, you will see all of the styles used in this theme along the left of the Theme Editor. Click Preview Theme to see how the theme looks. When you mouse over the preview, you will see pop-ups that show you which of the style tags applies to which of the sections.

To edit a style setting, click it on the left to bring up the CSS settings for the particular style (Figure 7), and then alter the settings. On the left you can type in things directly, or you can use the selectors on the right to choose from listed options. Once your changes have been made, click Update & Preview to see the preview pane with your alterations in place. You can then click Return to edit style to go back and change what you just did.

Figure 7. The Blog-City Theme Editor Style Page for the Jazz Cafe Theme's .pagetitle CSS Setting

When you are finished changing the theme, click save/load at the top of the style listing. This action takes you back to the Theme Management main page. Change the name of the theme in the Current Theme Name, click the box to make the theme your live/public theme, and then click Save Current Theme. When you update your blog, the new settings should be in place.

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Thanks

goraca laska's picture
Submitted by goraca laska (not verified) on Wed, 12/20/2006 - 17:24.

Thanks for this advices.
They really help me in creating my own blog.

thank you

Remix's picture
Submitted by Remix (not verified) on Wed, 08/23/2006 - 11:47.

Thank you guys.
Now i preparing new blog about Music remixes
Really like your job
thanks
Dj Remix from Poland

BlueDragon (ColdFusion)

Student Management Leader's picture
Submitted by Student Management Leader (not verified) on Sat, 08/19/2006 - 18:04.

BlueDragon rocks! Glad to see massive sites like blog-city helping to show it's a highly scalable and powerful web application platform. :)

My Blog about Madonna

Marcin's picture
Submitted by Marcin (not verified) on Fri, 07/28/2006 - 00:11.

Thank you guys, all I found here is great thing for me. Just started my first blog about Madonna.It's really fast and simple.Good Job !!!

Creating Blog

Derek Adnerg's picture
Submitted by Derek Adnerg (not verified) on Tue, 07/11/2006 - 17:59.

I run several standard websites and heard a lot about blogs. But I didn't thought about my own blog. Until I get here. Read about creating blogs and suddenly discovered it must be simple. Definitely I try to do my own blog now.
Thank you guys.

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