Tables and What-Not

A while back, I made a post that had several pictures which illustrated whatever point I was making (I don't remember the post or anything about it). I could not get Blogger to format it correctly using their tools and features, so I figured I'd just make a table and throw everything in there... it didn't work.

Blogger did not like a table in the main body of the post and it took up the entire page, with one picture way up at the top, a block of text off in the sidebar, another picture down at the bottom - etc. I spent like three hours trying to get that post to work and basically lost the entire day to it; I never got it to work and I never tried using tables in Blogger again.

Well, I got tired of the long-assed sidebar a few weeks back and, on a whim, I made a little table for the sidebar and threw some of the elements in there just to see if I could get it work. It did - it worked brilliantly! I have not tried a table in a post again, so I don't know if that works, but I have since learned more about CSS and in-line styling, so I don't really need to use that formatting anymore; anything I can't accomplish regularly I can pretty much crib-together with my limited CSS knowledge nowadays, or just not do.

But back to the story at-hand:

I've spent the last few days playing around with things and tabled some of the elements and I'm pleased with the outcome. However, since this is the Blogger Beta, it has all sorts of widgets and nonsense which are practically impossible to decipher, so there are two ways to go about this: either spend a day or two figuring out what those stupid things mean and working them about, or basically deleting all the little blocks (widgets) and incorporating everything into one HTML sidebar that I can set into a table and code directly into the template. Either way, it's going to take some time.

I went about the WWW tonight, looking at Blogger templates, and even took a few for test-drives, but none of them worked - none of them - they all returned errors and XML parsing messages, or they simply did not work. So I'm back to square one with this, but that's kinda cool because whatever I come up with is guaranteed to be unique... just may take a while to implement.

At any rate, I will make sure to give you a heads-up before I do anything major, just in case. I have a bad habit of uploading a bunch of stuff all at once and not checking all of it right away, then finding out a week later that entire sections didn't "take" and have been down.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008