How to decrease your Blog Title Font, Blogger Page Header Font

From Template, HTML Edit, do a find (use your browser's find feature) for "pagetitlefont", change default=from 270% (mine was) to a smaller number, such a 140%. I have changed all "<" to "(" because blogger thought this was an HTML code and wanted to execute it instead of showing it as text.

(Variable name="pagetitlefont" description="Blog Title Font" type="font" default="normal normal 270% Georgia, Serif"
value="normal normal 270% Georgia, Serif")

Google's face lift for Blogger.com

Google unveiled a Beta update version to Blogger.com. It does have a few crucial improvements. When I updated my template, the Title to my Blog become HUGE AGAIN!!!. I found the html code culprit for those SUPER LARGE BLOG TITLE FONT!!!:

From your browser, do a find (Control F), enter "pagetitlefont." It was about 1/4 inch down on my vertical scroll window. Change this to 140%-170%. Now you have sane sized title fonts, FINALLY!!! I also downsized several other title fonts, for the date stamp, post header, post comment etc.

Now that I have (re-)discovered this change, I think my experiment with blogging on Blogger.com is coming to a close. The site still does not give an easy way to make text flow nicely around posted pictures, an easy way to upload a lot of pictures at once (FTP hosting of pictures), and the ability to control text line spacing, padding between design elements etc. FrontPage was really good for these types of static content webpage design (newspaper style). Although FrontPage is not integrated with a database for quickly serving up dynamically changing shopping cart-like material, it was super easy to use and easy enough to make a professionally laid out text and photo pages. I will post a few more events/software reviews, and then move on to a more professionally hosted solution to my blogs. I am also intending to start a more serious blog on finance and investing related to my StockWiki pre-launch company. If anyone is reading, nice to have you along and I'll post a link to my later, more serious blog site. Jennifer

Jennifer Yoon's Review of Blogging Services, Free Personal Websites, Software on the Web

I came across an extended discussion of blogging software by veteran bloggers. The general consensus seems to be -- that Blogger.com & Blogspot.com was very bad and WordPress is the best for serious bloggers (the ones who want a following). TypePad got 2nd choice for ease of use. WordPress seems to require some investment in time to learn some new software & codes, but a lot of good tutorials are supposed to be available and it's definitely not just for programmers. WordPress is said to be a do-it-yourself project, but also gives full control over the design/look of your blog.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/07/12/what-would-i-do-different-if-i-had-to-start-my-blog-over-duncan-riley/
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/07/16/1-question-interview-index-page/
http://wordpress.org/
http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/

I am writing this and other negative reviews of Blogger.com right on my Blogger blog. So, at lease it's proof the company is not sensoring anything. My main complaint is that it is difficult to make my blog look anywhere near nice looking using layout, font sizes, and image uploads. It's very slow and often freezes, losing my edits. Others mention SPAM from blogspot.com's comments section as their number one problem. I don't have this problem, even though I have the comments turned on.

I've tried out the Flickr for uploading multiple images. Flickr IS a well executed, nice looking site, with a fun way of forming "groups" to pool public photos by topic/tags. I had a lot of fun looking at handmade cards and sewing & craft photos. Flickr also offers simple blogging, which may be MUCH more preferable if you want to blog with a lot of pictures, like I do.
http://flickr.com/photos/jyoon/ (my sample photo of cards on Flickr)
http://flickr.com/search/groups/?q=craft%20cards%20handmade&w=15834567%40N00&m=pool (a serach result for craft, cards, handmade on Flickr)

Best looking FREE website I've come across is SiteKreator.com. They have enough templates to choose from for that your site can look good. The only drawback is that the free version comes with only 10 MB of storage, but 100 MB is only $20/year. Of course, you can also create a blog. The "passing through India" blog had BEAUTIFUL photos from all over India. It's travel without leaving your desk. The added benefit of SiteKreator is the multiple location hosting. In the unlikely event that your blog/website becomes famous, it will still serve up pages to tens of million of your newfound friends.
http://sitekreator.com/sitekreator/personal_edition.html
http://sitekreator.com/passingthroughindia/index.html

A very good collaborative web service for a small group to share calendar, to do lists, project files, and divying up tasks among co-workers is CollectiveX. Users can also edit word-type of documents online, though the features are a bit basic.
http://www.collectivex.com/

A service that I LOVE is Zoho's spreadsheets. It has 300 functions including almost all statistical and financial functions built-in (this is comparable to Excel's data analysis pack plug-in). So far, I have not found any function lacking for financial statement analysis. It is not customized for stock investment analysis like StockWiki's spreadsheet will be, but this sofware has all the basics we hope to offer on our site and it looks great too. It's said to be a tad slow and loses edits when 2 people are editing the same spreadsheet simultaneously. I supposed it would work fine if the 2 people take turns editing (every other day), which will be closer to real usage.

Others rave about Zoho's word processor. They seem to offer other Microsoft Office like applications over the web. I think you should definitely check it out if you are interested in alternative Office-like apps, especially if you need to work with someone over the web and usually e-mail documents back and forth.
http://www.zohosheet.com/home.do

That's it for now. I have more neat software I've found, but will post about them later.

Blogger complaint

I was not able to reproduce the nice layout I had made using FrontPage 2003 onto my blog posts. Blogger would not accept frontpage's tagging, so none of the nice "filmstrip" layout I had made, or any of the formatted headers and description of each card made it onto my blog. I cut and pasted some of the cards and their description, but it does not look as nice. Also, blogger repeatedly failed to upload a picture, even though I received the "done" message. Eliminating extra space and moving the pictures were difficult. Blogger lost my pictures many times when I tried to move them a bit. I had to upload each pictures several times. Pages also froze often.

I really don't think this is ready for prime time. But, many others seem to like it a lot. Else Blogger.com would not have received so much free publicity. - jyoon

Jennifer Yoon User Review of Blogger.com and blogging

This is actually not at all easy to use. It takes forever to upload pictures. It's like pulling finger nails off of a female prison torture victim. Yeee-yikes! I will just have to figure out how to get my own website working again (don't know who has the password for admin privileges anymore). And get FrontPage 2003 to work again and play nice with me. Microsoft apps keep asking for the original CD even after I thought I specified full install. Next time, I will make an image CD and keep that along with the passkey digits. I don't know where the CD is for FrontPage 2003, although I do have the passkeys (since Word 2003 etc. are already installed I can look it up as part of the Office Prof 2003 package). I've moved recently cross country... so have not found, reinstalled, organized all things yet.

Blogger's free templates make headers WAYYYYY toooo BIGGGGG! I tried to see if I can manually change it to something close to normal size, but I can't find the Html code for font size on blog titles. I can't place the pictures on the page where I want to. It's difficult to manipulate placement. Other people's blogs look SOOOOO MUCH NICERRRR. I'm definitely sure they did not use the built-in editor to create their blog posts (at least not the free one). I need to find a free web hosting site for pictures and text that is better at providing page layout tools and more sane free page templates. Maybe the title fonts are so big in order to score higher on the Ad Sense rankings. It makes for a poor looking template.

I tried to use Mambo a while back, but it got merged, then overwhelmed by users, then relauched and lost some archieved data... Anyway, I am not a programmer and it was too daunting a task to learn a new language just to write my personal webpages on Mambo.

I will stick with FrontPage 2003 until I can devote more time to learning Ruby, Rails and MySQL at the same time. Wait--, Bill told me about Adobe Flex2 using Flash 9. It looked a lot like a FileMaker development & template environment. (I love developing on FileMaker and have been supporting my Dad's business database on it for 20? years now). Flex2 has rectagles and text boxes that I can drag and drop. Fonts can be chaged from a drop-down menu. This might be a solution for non-programmer like me. Although, I am not a total newbie because I was editing on DOS text editor and programming on AutoCAD and Lotus123 long before Windows 3.1. But it seems that everything I know is at a MUCH lower level (machine code Intel 8088/80286, VLIW when that was done only on supercomputers), and so it does not seem to help at all in this web progamming age. I keep expecting it to be easy to publish a web page, but it isn't yet. On the desktop, applications to create a simple Word document with embedded pictures and text that flow around the pictures are easy as cake to create. Why isn't it similarly easy on the web?

I guess it will become that easy, but just not yet.
Even machine language had quite a bit of time to develop. Boolean algebra may have been around since late 1800's and the Disk Operating System (stored on a floppy disk) also had been around for good number of years by the time I was using them in early 1980's.

Waiting for it to get better... going to see if I can find get the Admin privilege on my personal website... Looking to do more unpacking and organizing per David Allen's GTD.
- JY

Update: saw SiteKreator. Has much better free templates and seems easier to control page layout of pictures. Limited to 10 MB only on the free account. Will check it out for my personal websiter. -- JY