Although the current trend in the Romance Community is to blog in WordPress, I’ve tried it (both at .org and .com) and I truly prefer blogger. I’m not an expert in coding or HTML, but, to me, blogger is far more “tweakable” and so in blogger I stay.
Even a lay-person like myself can google just about any blogger formatting question and find an answer, even it it does take a few false starts (and diligence in saving your template, just in case something goes terribly wrong!)
I’ve had a twitter widget on this blog for awhile, but I coveted the fancy-schmancy twitter version after I saw it on Two Nerdy History Girls. But, how could I get it?
As it turned out, creating the widget was easy enough:
1. Go to the widgets Page in Twitter: http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_profile
2. Customize using your blog’s colors (which can be found with a quick search of your page’s source code–right click and scroll to “view source”)
3. Click “Finish and Grab Code” and use the Blogger button to add the widget to your page elements.
Ta-da!
Unless, that is, you are as picky as I am. The default size is 250×300 and I didn’t like that size. I tweaked using twitter widget customization page as shown above.
First, I tried the “auto fit” option in twitter, but I didn’t like how that looked either. Next, I tried proportionally shrinking the widget to 200×240. I used the blogger button to add the revised code to my blogger page.
Now I had a size I liked, but (Crankey!) the widget was off to the left and I wanted it centered. There is no option to center on twitter’s page, so I commenced yet another Great Google Adventure.
Many false starts were involved before I finally discovered a way to center the widget. Here’s the trick:
Success! A lovely, little, centered twitter widget in my column. YEEESSSSSSSSS!
(Incidentally, I had to go an another Great Google Adventure to learn how to create a jpeg so I could post HTML without Blogger recognizing the HTML. THEN I realized that I could have checked the “show HTML literally” box under Post Options. As my niece says, *sigh* “It’s a process”)