Here I'm going to talk a little about my experience of setting up the blog. The technical stuff. In my next post I'll talk about the psychological/emotional (yes really!) stuff - which for me is a much bigger deal! I thought I'd break it into two posts so that anyone reading who doesn't want to be privy to my blog neuroses can avoid them by just reading this first post...
I have to admit I'm finding Blogger quite fiddly to work with. It was really easy to sign up, name, and choose a basic template, a definite point in Blogger's favour, but once I began to want to fine-tune things (font sizes, font colours, etc.) I started to feel a bit dazed and confused! I am at best a third-rate techie, and have to keep asking a longsuffering colleague for help (which he willingly gives). When I'm in the advanced tab of the template designer I'm not always sure which option corresponds to which element of the blog design. I'm sure once I've spent a bit more time fiddling around I'll get the hang of it, and in fact the kind of changes I want to make are probably barely perceptible to anyone else, just personal whims regarding the size of this text with relation to that, or the amount of space between things (if you read my first post, you'll know that space, be it white or, in the case of my blog, a pale custardy colour, is important to me!). I'm sure there are very good reasons for Blogger to work the way it does, so I don't really mean to suggest that my niggles should be catered for, but it's just a bit frustrating to have an idea in your head of how you want something to be, and for it not to be immediately obvious how to achieve this.
One final thing - I wanted to use one of my own photos for the background, but it has to be under "300K", and seeing as all my photos come from a fairly decent digital camera, the file sizes are much larger. Can anyone help me with this? Is there a simple but effective way for me to reduce the file size of my photos?
3 comments:
Hello! I had a similar problem when trying to sort out my own background. Blogger restricts the types of file you can use and the size (which as you say has to be under 300KB). It also recommends certain dimensions of file (1800 pixels width by something else pixels height) if you want to avoid the image appearing tiled. What I ended up doing was cropping my photo so that it was very wide and fairly short, and that way it tiles top to bottom without being too obvious. That won't work effectively with all photos
If you're using Windows, then Microsoft Office Picture Manager is quite user-friendly for resizing image files, but you can even do it in basic applications like Paint (choose 'Image' and then 'Stretch and Skew', making sure to keep the same stretch ratio for horizontal and vertical, otherwise it ends up looking like something in a hall of mirrors).
Hi Gareth. Thanks for the tips. I will experiment with my photos later! I had actually been wondering about the background to your blog. Are they your books? Selected at random? Particular favourites?
They are my own. I have run out of shelf space (this must be a problem familiar to most librarians in both their personal and professional lives), so I have various piles of books placed strategically in positions where I ought not to trip over them. The ones in the picture are random, though there must be some sequences that happen to be arranged in the order in which I read them.
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