Saturday 25 August 2007

TIP - Post Formatting

You compose your 'post'. That's the hard part. You post your 'post'. That's the easy part. You sit back and wait for somebody to visit, read and comment. That's the satisfactory part.

In between you get on with your life. As we all do. But isn't it amazing that when the Blogging-bug has struck that we all appear to schedule our everyday tasks around our (sacrosanct) blogging time?

So, why not make it easy on yourself? Why not pre-plan how you compose and publish your blog posts so that when you hit the "PUBLISH POST" button you can be assured that they will appear exactly how you envisaged they would?

1. Select 'Dashboard' or 'Customise' (depending where you are on your Blog) and you will be taken to your 'Template' page. Select 'Settings', then 'Formatting' and you will be faced with the page you can see in the pic below. Take note of the two areas I mention. These are the main changes you may need to make, but check the rest of the boxes in case you've overlooked something. Don't forget to "Save Settings" after you've made your changes. These changes aren't critical, unlike changes you make to the template; they can always get changed back if you aren't satisfied with what you've done!

 

 

2. In the pic below you will see that I have already inserted a few 'justified' paragraph 'starts' and 'ends', because that is how I compose my posts. Your mileage will vary. I also have the whole code for the 'Up Arrow' that I use at the end of each post. This makes life easy for me as I don't have to remember the exact code, and since it appears in exactly the same place in each post (repetitive coding) I decided to insert it into the formatting template for all future posts.

 

 

I also have a series of 'hyphens' (dashes) included as a standard divider between 'sections' of a post. It was something I started in my earlier posts and something I decided I would continue to do for subsequent ones. I could find a post with a dashed line and copy/paste it into the new post, but this way is so much easier, don't you think?

You may wish to use a horizontal rule instead and you can achieve that by using the 'Compose' feature and selecting it from the menu, or if you are using the HTML feature just type the following ...

<hr width="50%" align="center">

... to give you a horizontal rule that is 50% of the width of the display area, and which is centred in the middle of the page.

More tips to come ... !

back to the top

 

2 comments:

Jenera said...

I always wondered what that box was for! I'm going to try that out and play with it. I hate having to do the code each and every time I go to make a post!

THanks!

Fletch said...

Glad the tip is of some help, Jenera.

Don't forget to 'clean-up' all the superfluous coding before publishing!