Bags Under my Eyes Courtesy of Bungalow Dreams
Thanks to that - huge – geek over at Bungalow Dreams, I’ve been inspired to dive into the depths of hell and have managed to surface with some flaming ‘blog bling’.
I should preface this by saying that while I think I have a fairly decent eye for design, my only experience in formally learning anything to do with computer language was back in high school. That memory is pretty vague, since we learned Fortran and Cobol (long forgotten)...and used punch cards.
HTML wasn’t too hard to grasp in the beginning, because the whole ‘nested code’ thing was very much how I remember having to format word processing documents back in the days of WordStar. Then they had to go and complicate everything. Yep, I probably should be reaching for the Nice ‘N’ Easy now, but for some demented reason, my husband thinks those grey hairs are ‘sexy’.
But I digress…on to the good stuff. I did a fair bit of poking around and learned a few neat tricks today:
Styling my blog’s blockquote was something I’d been trying to do for awhile. Today, I think it came together. I just had to understand where to put it, and how to do it. An unexpected accomplishment (I was actually trying to figure out how to do something else when the dim bulb finally lit).
Incorporating Technorati Tags was another boggler, but I think I found an elegant ‘cheater’ way to do this (which will be of special interest to Ranch Redo and Bungalow ‘23, who are also hosted by Blogsome, but might work for others as well—try it).
I discovered this post on how to create a Technorati ‘bookmarklet’. This places a bit of Javascript code right on your browser’s bookmark toolbar (I’m using Firefox). Now, when I write my post, I just have to click on my bookmarklet and enter my tags and it generates the code to copy in at the bottom of my post. I even geeked out a bit and managed to personalize the code a little so it’s right justified.
Some of you are probably laughing now, but I feel like I’ve just split the atom.
Bungalow Dreams (Monica & Marc), you deserve all the credit here. Thanks for spreading the blog love.
technorati tags: technorati, blogsome, houseblog, insomnia
Thanks for the inspiration! I will certainly have to check this out and “geek up” my blog a bit. Your blog looks great and is obviously getting better all the time. I particularly like your banner, but you have a nice clean look throughout that I could certainly learn from. Thanks for the link, too.
Cheers,
Josh @ Bungalow’23
Comment by Josh — March 17, 2006 @ 6:50 pm
Coolness, Shauna! I’m loving your blockquote style and other special things you’ve added. I don’t know much about tags and such…I need to study up! How quicky things progress and change in the internet world!
Looking good!
Comment by Twilightmama — March 18, 2006 @ 7:26 am
Glad you are taking advantage of the neat Tagging Bookmarklet for Wordpress.com users. There are so many cool things you can do with bookmarklets, they are often overlooked.
And I’m always anxious to see what people have done with my idea. My tag list and “signature” doesn’t look the same as what I originally wrote, and I keep tweaking it, which makes this whole process part of the fun, doesn’t it.
Enjoy!
Comment by Lorelle — July 2, 2006 @ 8:42 pm