Card based blog design – how to divide each post into a separate box on Blogger
Card-based layouts are becoming increasingly popular across the web, with many popular sites like Pinterest, Dribble and Google+ adapting the style. They are usually presented in a grid or list, showing a summary of information that is easy to scan. This makes them perfect for displaying blog posts. This post will explain the basic method…
Black Friday Deals for your Blog and Business – Hosting, Domains, Adobe Photoshop and More
As I’m sure your inbox has made you aware, Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday weekend is upon us. I wasn’t planning on doing any Black Friday posts this year, but I came across a few great discounts on products and services I love and use for my business so I wanted to share those great…
How to enable the Search Description field on Blogger to increase page views
Search engines typically take the first couple of sentences of a blog post as use that as the site description on their results page. However, there is a feature on Blogger allowing you to write individual summary for each post. This allows you to choose the description which can help improve the number of visits…
How to add “Click to Tweet” link within posts to encourage social sharing
Today’s post will show you how to add Click to Tweet boxes in your posts on both Blogger and WordPress. You can add these Tweet boxes throughout your posts allowing readers to click and easily share pre-written content that links back to your blog. It’s an effective way to increase engagement and get more shares…
Burnout, vunerability, micro-blogging + working with brands – Blogtacular 2016
I can’t believe it’s already been a month since Blogtacular! Since I wrote about my Blogtacular 2015 experience I wanted to write another post to compare and share what I learned as I know a lot of you were thinking about going. Before I get started discussing the day I want to say a huge…
Attending Blogtacular 2016? See you there!
I’m so excited to announce that I’ll be returning to Blogtacular June 18th. I held the DIY Blog Design session last year, and met some really lovely people as well as having a fantastic day. I am so happy to be invited back, I cannot wait! Blogtacular is an annual blogging conference held in London.…
How to SEO your blog posts on Blogger – Video Walkthrough with FREE checklist
Today’s post is about taking my SEO tips and putting them into action in order to optimise your posts and blog content. I’ve written quite a few posts on SEO – covering basics of writing content and optimising images to increasing your domain authority, removing broken links and using NoFollow links. Despite covering a few…
An alternative way to fix blurry popular post images on Blogger
I’ve had a couple of questions recently about why the popular post images on Blogger are suddenly appearing blurry. I previously posted a fix to this issue here by automatically changing the S value which controls the quality, but it seems that Blogger has changed how it hosts images and no longer uses the S…
How to read and write CSS correctly – Basics of HTML/CSS #10
Todays post is part of the HTML for Beginners series, and will explain some of the basics of CSS. It’s not the most interesting, but knowing the basics of HTML and CSS will help you. It will make tweaking your blog design and figuring out errors so much easier! What Is CSS? CSS stands for…
Blogtacular 2015 – Design*Sponge, Full-Time Blogging, Instagram and DIY Blog Design
This post has been sitting in my drafts since June 2015. Instead of randomly publishing it I thought I’d wait and publish it today. Why today you ask? Well tickets for Blogtacular 2016 went on sale this weekend!! I wanted to share my experience incase any of you are thinking of going on the 18th…
How to Correctly Centre Different Items on Blogger
Want to know how to centre your header image, blog post images, sidebar images, gadgets, text, headings and everything else on Blogger? I’ve created a reference list below for you explaining how to correctly center the different elements on Blogger, without needing to use deprecated methods. This post was previously part of a post titled…
How to make YouTube or Vimeo Videos Responsive on your site
YouTube, Vimeo and other video hosts make it easy to embed videos on your website and blog using frames, however there isn’t a responsive option and editing iframes is near impossible. This tutorial will show you how to make YouTube and Vimeo videos responsive on your site. Responsive YouTube and Vimeo Videos 1. Find the…
How to customise the 404 not found page on Blogger
The not found page on Blogger is really boring and unhelpful. It doesn’t encourage your readers to visit other areas of your site or help them find something they are looking for. This tutorial will show you how to edit the content and design to make it more user friendly. If you want to have…
How to customize the Blogger EU Cookies Notification Bar
I’ve been getting quite a few questions about the Cookie Notification that appears on Blogger blogs – from why it’s there, to can it be removed to how to customise it. This post is going to run through all the information about it and show you how to customise the notice to suit your blog…
Resize Bloggers popular post images to fit the width of your sidebar without being blurry
Todays post is going to show you how to change the size of the images used in Bloggers popular post gadget so that they are bigger and clearer. This has been highly requested recently as a lot of people are adding this gadget to their sidebar and above / below blog posts to help promote…
Apply CSS to specific pages on Blogger using conditional tags
Ever wanted to apply code to specific areas of your Blogger template but not to other sections? This is something I’ve included in certain tutorials/comments before but without fully explaining it. As more and more people are now asking about how to apply HTML/CSS to certain areas of their blog and not to others I…
How to style a link to look like a clickable button on your blog
Sometimes a simple link isn’t enough, sometimes using a “button” makes the link stand out more and is easier for readers to identify the link as clickable. While this isn’t actually a button (using the button tag) we can style links to look like clickable buttons. Here is an example of a link that is…
What you need to know about the box model (editing margin, padding and border values)
We’re back with another HTML for Beginners post, this time on the Box Model. Margin and Padding are used so often for spacing out elements in a design. I mention the two a lot in tutorials and regularly get asked how to edit spacing on different design elements in comments and emails. Today’s post will…
5 common coding mistakes on blogs
Before changing my direction in September, I’d say about 70% of what I did was coding fixes, tweaks, maintenance and development for existing templates. The Template Cleanup package is one of my most requested services. I’ve seen thousands of templates over the last few years helping out fellow bloggers – some custom, some pre-made, some…
How to install DISQUS Comments on Blogger
DISQUS is one of the most popular commenting systems out there for blogs. I mentioned it previously when I compared the 3 main commenting systems for Blogger so you can read about the benefits and features of DISQUS in that post. It has a great design and spam filter, is easy to install and use…
Add related posts to single post only on Blogger (hide on homepage)
I’ve had quite a few requests since my previous post listing the Alternatives to nRelate Related Posts for a tutorial on how to remove related posts from the homepage and only have them displayed on posts pages. This quick tutorial will show you how. I’ll be using Engageya but this will work for Linkwithin and…
Enable Pinterest Rich Pins for Blogger or WordPress
Rich Pins on Pinterest are just like standard Pins but they include some extra information about the source of the pin, quite similar to Twitter Cards. There are five different types of Rich Pins at the moment – products, movies, recipes, articles or blog posts and places. Decide what type of Rich Pin suits your…
Alternatives to nRelate – related posts for Blogger
nRelate announced rather suddenly yesterday that as of December 31st 2014, their services will be shut down. This means that if you have a related or popular posts widget or plugin that is by nRelate on your site they will no longer work come January and you will need to find an alternative. They advise…
How to add a line behind post title, date or text
Today’s post will show you how to add a line behind text on your blog, in a similar way to strikethrough or deleted text but instead of the line going through the text it will appear behind it, like so This is usually seen as an image, but it is possible with a little bit…
Category: Miscellaneous
Some personal updates, opinion pieces and miscellaneous content
