Blogger Bug when using the MINIMA

Last few weeks it was raining mail (again) concerning a bug when using the Minima template. After installing the Minima and republishing the blog people notice the first-post-body-text is pushed under the sidebar(s)! True ... don't blame the template (dont' blame MIE and DON'T blame ME)! This happens because of a Blogger software update where the post body is wrapped in a <div clear:both> tag! The solution (or better: workaround): Disabling Float Alignment! Blogger Dashboard > Settings > Formatting > Enable float alignment > No Republish the Blog! A Blogger Buzz note: "... suppressing the markup will result in layout problems when using left or right alignment for images." A personal note: this can be avoided by embedding the <$BlogItemBody$> in a html table, as I did in my own templates. But I chose to keep the Minima 3-column template code completely 'as is'! A good choice, I think :-) (A 'clean' clone, so to speak!)

Maintaining the template offline

For some of you this really will be obvious ... for some it will not ... BLOGGER: For template maintenance Blogger provides a Template Editor: Blogger Dashboard > Template > Edit current You can use this window to change the template and hit the Preview button to view the results. Apart from the fact that the result isn't 100% reliable, this is a good feature. A faster and easier way is to bring this process to your kitchen table: OFFLINE! The Workspace: copy the template code and save it in a file, like My Documents/My eBooks/blog.html Open blog.html in your browser File > Open file > blog.html (= Ctrl+O) Open blog.html in Notepad Right Mouse click > Open with > Notepad Arrange both windows side-by-side on your desktop! The Edit process: Edit your blog.html in Notepad and save with Ctrl+S reload the page in the browser - use the Reload current page icon or Ctrl+R and again ... and again ... and again ... (you can instantly view every small change in a split-second!) Copy and Paste the final code in the Blogger Template Editor and Republish the blog Advantages: Using shorthand keys makes the preview process really fast; You are working offline, so there's no worry about accidently shattering the real thing :-) And, as stated above, this is fast, safe and easy "trial-and-error"! You are not depending on Blogger here ... less waiting, I mean. When you only want to change your styling you can work with the code of a generated page (like in the example image above). Looking at a real flesh&blood page may help you to get the wanted result faster! open your blog Right Mouse click > View page source > Copy and Paste source code to blog.html Make your changes in the STYLE section of blog.html and view the results When done, copy the STYLE section (that is <style type="text/css"> ... </style>) to your template Republish the blog ... OTHER BLOG MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS: When using WordPress, Serendipity, etc. or a real CMS (like Exponent, Joomla, whatnot) working offline is even more essential. A very easy-to-use and reliable way to get yourself a working APACHE + PHP + MySQL environment is installing XAMPP on your very own local machine! I suppose people who are able to work in an environment like this know what they are doing ... so here's just a few notes: WordPress provides a tutorial for Installing XAMPP and WordPress! The XAMPP Lite version will do! Easy as Breathing XAMPP Lite is a very reduced version of XAMPP with Apache 2.2.0 + PHP 5.1.1 (without PEAR) + MySQL 4.1.18 + PHPMyAdmin 2.7.0-pl1 + Openssl 0.9.8 + SQLite 2.8.15 + eAccelerator 0.9.4. For lovers! For the lite versions exist no upgrades or addons. XAMPP Lite is an only "Take-Run-Delete-Forget-it" package.