Making your blog look good

Maybe you've noticed other blogs and thought "How do they do that?". Maybe you've got an idea for how you want your blog to look, but don't know if it's possible. Either way, this course will help.

Of course, it's no good if the blog looks good, but doesn't provide the information your visitors want. That's why we'll be looking at how some of the tools can help bring the right information to the right place on your blog.

Here's an outline of the things we'll cover.

Presentation

Themes

• What is a theme?
• Selecting a theme
• "Widget-friendly" themes

Plugins

• What they are and what they do
• Site-wide plugins
• Some examples of popular plugins
  • Event Calendar
  • Sidebar Widgets
  • BubbleShare
  • Flickr Post Bar
  • Democracy Poll

Sidebar Widgets

• What are they?
• How to use them
• Using Text Widgets
• Using RSS Widgets

Content

Images

• Flickr images
• BubbleShare galleries
• uploading your own images
  • Link to image option
  • linking to Page

Audio

• mp3 files

Video

• Google Video: you can embed Google video in your blog posts using this syntax [googlevideo]identifier-of-your-video[/googlevideo]
  • Here's an example. Say you've uploaded your video to Google Video, and its Google video URL is:

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-187813820761177694&hl=en-GB

    The video’s ID is everything after the = sign, so this video is embedded in the post using this syntax:

    [googlevideo]-187813820761177694&hl=en-GB[/googlevideo]

    You can see this one working here.

• Quicktime movies

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