beautiful blogs

Okay so I had a lot of people ask about my backgrounds on my blog and stuff so I thought I would just do a post so everyone who wants to play around with their blog can get the information. I actually have to admit that this information is really from my sister-in-law Andrea, she passed it along to me when I asked her about her cute blog. So I can't really take the credit for it. But this is just kinda the basics of changing the background. I seriously don't know much about computers, sadly, but it is really quite easy to figure out if you just play around with it for a while. There have actually been quite a few times that I completely erased my entire blog because I was erasing and adding stuff into the HTML code.....and it didn't work. But it really isn't that hard if you just follow the instructions.


Set up an account with www.photobucket.com

Go to a site like www.shabbyprincesss.com ( or any other scrapbook sites) and click on any of their downloads (they are free), once you download it to your desktop then create a folder called scrapbook or something like that to put them in after you extract them.

Right click the downloaded item on your desktop and select extract files... then select Extract and replace files and select the folder you just created. The images should now show up in that folder.

Okay now you'll go to your photobucket account and upload whatever scrapbook images you want and in whatever size you want. If your image is not showing up the size you want it to in your blog then you will need to fiddle around with uploading it to Photobucket as a different size.

Now log in to your blogger account, I'm not sure if you are using the new blogger or the old one, I am on the new one so this is how I do it in mine.

Choose the Minima blog template in the Pick New Template section under the Pick New Template tab. If you want to change the color of your background then you’ll want to choose the Minima Dark template.

Then click on the Edit HTML section. To get my sidebar image to appear I hit the crtl and f key at the same time then enter the word background then the Find Next button. Look for something like this:

body {
background:$bgcolor;
margin:0;
color:$textcolor;
font:x-small Georgia Serif;
font-size/* */:/**/small; font-size: /**/small;
text-align: center;

In between background: $bgcolor; and margin:0 type in background-image: url

Now go into your photobucket account and decide what image you want to be shown on your sidebar and copy its URL Link

In your blogger html file paste the url link after backround-image:url so that it looks something like this: body {
background:$bgcolor;background-image:url(http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w105/suzannejhart/RHONNAFARRER_2PS_APRILFREEPEAKIT_FL.png);background-repeat:repeat-y; margin:0;
color:$textcolor;
font:x-small Georgia Serif;
font-size/* */:/**/small;
font-size: /**/small;
text-align: center;

Remember to include the parenthesis around it and ;background-repeat:repeat-y; at the end
Now save your template and view your blog- it should show up.


If that seems too complicated there is also a website that is SUPER easy. It is pyzam and it has tons and tons of blog templates. You are going to click on blogger templates on the left and there will be a whole list of them. Then when you find one you want, click "get the code" and copy it. Then go into your blog and get into your layout and go into "edit HTML". You are going to erase the entire thing and replace it with the code from the website. I think they have the instructions on that website as well. Anyway I hope that helps everyone who was interested. I know there are many out there that know much more about this than I do but this is what I know how to do. I am sure there are tons and tons of websites that have free templates and backgrounds to upload, these are just the ones that I use or I know of and are easy to use. Anyway good luck! I will eagerly be awaiting new beautiful blogs!