Edit Your Html: Customising Your Font on Blogger :)

She's my new best friend. :p

Hi everyone! Hope you're having a nice week :)

Today I've decided to feature a quick tutorial on customizing your font on Blogger. I have just figured it out and am almost too proud of myself ^-^

Well, first I have to give credit to Spring Flowers Blog Design because it showed me exactly what I was looking for.  It helped me soo much!

So HTML is kind of like a separate language. Like English, French, or whatever language you might speak or learn, it seems confusing to one who is not familiar with it. I know that if I looked at a page of German I would be entirely clueless. For me, HTML was an unknown thing to me a few months ago. Now, I feel like me and HTML are becoming better friends every day :p now that I've figured out the mystery of her. :)

Don't let yourself be intimidated by her-- She's friendly, I promise! (xD) And she won't bite! And she'll give you what you want if you're careful with her and you follow directions. Promise.  So, let's say you want to customize your font for free on Blogger. I'll tell you, and I hope it works for you and hope I'm not the only freak who figured this out. ;)

So, first. Log into your Blogger account (obviously :p).

 Click on Design. It's in the top right corner of your screen, which you already know if you're not a real newbie to blogging. :D

Click on "Edit HTML" . That button is next to the big orange button that says "Customise". It took me longer than it should have for me to find this one simple button.

There'll be a warning when you click on it, that says you should only Edit HTML if you're an advanced user. Yeah, yeah. You can do it, girl! I have faith in you. (Or, if you're a boy, you can do it, boy!) Click on Proceed. 

Scroll down (it will be fairly early in your scrolling process) until you see this:

<Group description="Page Text" selector="body">

     <Variable name="body.font" description="Font" type="Font"

         default="normal normal 12px Font, Font, Font, Font, Font" value="normal normal 12px Font"/>

NOTE: The text I've highlighted here will not be highlighted there. Also, in the place of "Font, Font, Font, Font, Font" will be the fonts you have already. 

Enter the name of the font you want your page text to be in in place of the highlighted places. You can also adjust the size where it says "12px" or whatever size font you currently have. 

When you're finished editing the HTML, it should look something like this (I'm using the font Century Gothic as an example, since that's what i have on my blog):

<Group description="Page Text" selector="body">

     <Variable name="body.font" description="Font" type="Font"

         default="normal normal 12px Century Gothic, Century Gothic, Century Gothic, Century Gothic, Century Gothic" value="normal normal 12px Century Gothic"/>

Then, of course, click on 'save'. View your blog. If it doesn't work, please tell in comments so I can investigate the issue! 

I really hope I helped you! :D

The Infamous Captcha :p

So, I know that all of you have probably come across this huge problem in blogs these days, and it's called Captcha.

Today, my friend Lottie over at La Lovely Stories   pointed the captcha on my blog out to me. I had no idea that it was there, and had gone through trying to decode the words on other people's blogs and found it frustrating. I thought, "well, It's good that my blog doesn't have one of these," but then I found out that it did, to my alarm.  I didn't know that it was automatic. I thought you had to adjust a setting.

It turns out, you do. The automatic is set as "yes" for "Set Word Verification". I didn't realize this. I scrolled through many websites talking about how to fix this, but none of them were helpful as there was no 'Old Blogger Interface' on my settings. So, I decided to find out how to do this MYSELF. I'm s smart girl right?

First, I went to "Settings".
Underneath "Settings", I clicked on "Posts and Comments".
Where it says "Show Word Verification", there's a drop-down menu.
To remove captcha, click on, "No."
It worked :)

Hope I helped some of you who might be confused, distressed... Etc. :)

love, love love
Annie :)

Designing A Cute Blog is Not For the Faint of Heart

To be honest I didn't think I would ever figure out how to make my blog look cute and interesting. Maybe it doesn't to some people but to be honest I like the way my blog is looking these days.  When I first started my blog I looked around at other people's blogs I found and was in awe of their perfection and beauty (ha-ha). I didn't think I would ever be able to make mine look as cute as theirs did! I had a Wordpress blog before I made this one and I didn't know you could make your blog look pretty and cute, so I just stuck with the boring old template they gave me and dealt with it. Then when I looked at the Blogspot blogs, I said, "I need to make one! They're so cute!" SO, I made my blog and spent long hours on the computer trying to figure out how to do this, how to switch this color, font, etc. etc. At first I had no idea what a "gadget" was, so it helped to know what that was. And I found some really good blogging websites that showed you how to make your blog pretty. If you're interested I would recommend The Cutest Blog On The Block and Makin' Cute Blogs because those two were the most helpful to me!

But still, I'm definitely not the expert blogger (far from it, in fact) so if you want some real experts don't listen to me. I'm just telling you guys about my experience slowly trying to put together a blog.  Some people say making a blog is easy. Yes, making a blog is easy. But making a CUTE blog is not not not not easy. My sister told me countless times that I needed to get off the computer and I sat there about to have a fistfight with the screen because I couldn't figure out how to do something. I admit it, I did ask for help from other bloggers and they were nice enough to give me it.  Although, I was probably annoying them out of their minds!

Let me give all of you new bloggers some advice: Go to other blogs for inspiration. (But don't copy them completely.) And if you want to know a basic way to adjust your fonts, colors, etc., go to Design in the top left corner of your blog (you must be signed in to do this), click on "Customise" underneath the mini blog example, and then click on Advanced and there you go! It took me longer than it should have for me to figure that one out, so finally my blog looked pretty (yay!).

A quick note on the websites above: They offer freebies such as backgrounds, banners, templates the list goes on. I'd recommend the Cutest Blog on the Block's backgrounds. They're super adorable.  Makin' Cute Blogs gives you some good advice and step by step tips on how to do things, which was also very helpful. And guys, don't get too intimidated by HTML--I was at first then I discovered that there was no need to! :)

So whether you're a new blogger and looking for some words of wisdom as to how to make a cute/fun blog, or if you're an old blogger in need of a new and interesting twist to your bare-bones blog, check out these websites. They rock! Good luck! :D