Widening Out

In a good way. I've been wanting to do this for a while, but I adjusted the site's CSS to extend the width of the posting areas to make use of more screen real estate. I realize the header image isn't yet updated to fit at this width, but I'm going to leave it as is so it will remind me to fix it. Its fixed! :)

"Justify" Is Your Friend

I've been reading a lot of blogs lately that don't use text justification in their posts. If you don't know what this is, shame on you! Using it will space out the words in your post so the right and left sides of your text block (your post) will be even. Most of the time, the default has your text aligned to the left only, thus leaving the right side of your post at the mercy of random line breaks based upon the width of your posting column.

Here's a couple easy ways to fix this.

1) Justifying each post manually
By doing this from your blogging application of choice, you simply go into the screen or tab where you're allowed to edit the HTML of your post directly. With Blogger, for example, you'd click your "Edit HTML" tab.

You can either type your post up before or after doing this, but when you're ready to edit your HTML, you want to wrap your entire post (all text and images too, if you want) in the following manner.

<div align="justify">BLOG POST HERE</div>

2) Using CSS
This is a tad more complicated to begin with, but once its set up, you don't need to remember to add a tag to the actual post, it will happen automatically for every post you create.

Unfortunately, not all blog templates are created equal, so its hard to know exactly what part of the CSS is used to adjust the attributes of your blog posts. Look for something along the lines of posts, main or main wrapper. Once the feature you want to modify has been located, simply add this to the following to the list of attributes.

text-align: justify;

Make sure to always put the semi-colon at the end of every line in the CSS, or it won't rebuild correctly. An example of what the final product will look like is something like this.

.mainwrapper {
margin: 0;
border: 10px solid black;
text-align: justify;
}

Once its all said and done, in my opinion, blog posts will look better and more professional. Its a simple "hack" that improves the overall quality of the blog.

Credits and Change Log

I have two posts up that I'll put permanent links to on the right which explain a bit about the changes I've made recently. One is a change log, which contains major changes I've made recently, since they're the first major changes I've performed since this blog's inception earlier in the year.

The second post is a "credits" post. I actually put up that post back when I started this Blogger blog. I've edited it and added some actual links to it. As you can see in the original post, it didn't have much, so I thought I'd spice it up a bit.

(Yes, I did post this at 12:40am. Go me.)

Major Change Log

I decided to keep a list of all the major changes I've made to the site and the dates on which I made them.

12/22/2007:

• Borders around images in posts have been nuked.
• Border and margin around the center wrapper has been added.
• Label cloud script added.
• Lowered the size of fonts by a bit across the board.
  

12/20/2007:

• Site background changed to blue.
  
• Blog post and sidebar column backgrounds changed to white, 75% opacity.
  
• Blog post + sidebar total width increased from 660px to 760px.
  
• Got rid of the "Posted by Chadness" byline on each post.
• Added full blogrolls to the sidebar.
• Space Invaders image added to background.
• New header image.

I've also done the layout for my wife's blog and continue to make little tweaks over there, as well.

Credit Goes To...

Special thanks to the following for their help/services on this blog:

• Blogrolling
• Phydeaux3 (label cloud hack)

Blog design and creative inspiration from:

• 8-Bit Joystick
• Castle in the Air
• The Empress of Eclecticism (currently The Empress in Exile)

For major changes to my blog visit the post I created just for that purpose.

[ORIGINAL POST: I looked through quite a few Blogger template sites and honestly couldn't find anything that I was particularly fond of. This layout is a modification of a layout offered by Blogger. I was going to use it for another, more focused, blog project I started working on, but it never came to fruition, and I liked the simple yet bold layout, so I adopted it over here.

This space is saved as a place to put links to sites, tools or people that helped me create this blog and I will update it accordingly (and stick a permanent link somewhere). Changes are always happening behind the scenes, so the look of the blog may change on a daily basis.]