Changed Blockquote coding in blog

I came across this guide for setting up a different blockquote styling in my blog. So, I delved into the HTML and commented out this section

#.post blockquote {
# margin: 1em 20px;
#}
#.post blockquote p {
# margin: .75em 0;
#}

and added this immediately above it

blockquote {
border-left: 30px solid #d9d9d9;
padding-left: 10px;
font-family: georgia, serif;
font-style: italic;
}

with the results you see in this post (and the rest of the blog).
I must admit that I don't understand why the part I commented out referred to both blockquote and blockquote p. However, so far it doesn't seem to have caused any problems.

Streamlining new Labels presentation in blog

Following what I did yesterday to get rid of that huge list of labels in the sidebar, I went a few steps further and chopped away a lot of the code so that only a drop-down box is available to see the labels.
I believe this is so much more tidy and convenient.
The HTML code I used is available here.

Hide labels in your blog

The labels in a blog sidebar can at times be almost overwhelming or even off-putting.
I came across this blogpost which outlines how you can tidy them up and provide options for displaying the list of labels as required.
The details of how to do this, as well as the code required, is provided in this blog.
Actually, doing it is very easy and should present no problems -- although as always care is advised.
As a result, the Labels section of the sidebar now shows no labels but, instead, four boxes. The link What Are These Boxes? explains what clicking each box does. But, I'll just summarise here for convenience:
First box: Hides the labels if already opened by clicking one of the other three boxes
Second box: Shows list of labels as it was previously
Third box: Provides a dropdown box of the labels
Fourth box: Show list similar to second box but with frequency shown by label font size rather than a number

However, I really didn't like this last one so I took it out of the code. So, this blog only shows the first three boxes. I've left, for the moment all four boxes in my other blog. Have a look there if you really want to see how the fourth box looks.

Blog publicity

Just to mention that I stumbled upon this excellent site, and this page in particular, which tells you all you need to know about setting up your blogspot blog to encourage traffic.
Of great importance are the keywords you set in your template HTML.
Also very important is to set up a sitemap.
Excellent reading for anybody starting a blogspot blog.

Upgraded blog title header

Today I made a significant change to the title header on my other blog. You can see it here (at least, until I change it again).
Or you can just see it in the screenshot.
I had thought about this for some time and it's based on the Book of Kells which was written (mostly) in Ireland about 1200 years ago.
The main font (other than the capital G and C), called the Kells font, I got from here.
Next I needed a capital G and C from the actual Book of Kells. After searching around in Google for a while, I eventually got a page with both letters on it.
The next problem was how to cut out these letters so that they actually looked like letters rather than square cut-outs containing the letters. For this you use Gimp's Foreground Selection Tool. Here's a video on how to use it (although it's called SIOX in the video but it's the very same thing).
Once the letters have been "cut out", they can now be copied (edit>>copy) and pasted (edit>>paste) onto another photo.
In my case, the other photo was a screenshot of the title (missing the capital G and C) made with OpenOffice Word Processor and then cropped in Picasa.
Once I had the title jpg suitably modified it was just a matter of substituting the image I already had in the header (a howto for this is in an earlier post to this blog).
It's sobering to think that whoever painstakingly crafted these two capital letters 1200 years ago using goose feathers and whatever else could not possibly have imagined that they would end up in my blog.

Using new font in Blog title.

I wanted to use the marvelous font shown here (sorry I can't reproduce it here in blogger) for my other blog title.
I used this guide to do it although, I made quite a few changes to what's recommended in this guide.
What I did was as follows:

1. Install the new font. So, just download it to your Desktop, unzip and copy the *.ttf file to /use/share/fonts/other. The /other directory I just made for want of anything better to call the new type of font I wanted to install.
2. Now open OpenOffice.org Word Processor and the new font should be available as an option.
Write out the title in more or less the size you need and change the font colour and background to what's applicable for your blog.
3. Now, take a screenshot.
4. In Picasa, crop the screenshot so that only the actual part you want to appear as your title appears in the shot.
5. Log into blogger and go to the dashboard of your blog. Click the Layout tab.
6. Click the Edit button on your Title header page element (probably labelled with the name of your blog)
7. Leave the Blog Title as it was (otherwise browser tabs won't show your blog title) and upload the Title .jpg image that you cropped in Picasa (upload from computer. I didn't need to upload first to Google Page Reader as the guide suggests)
8.Under Placement, select the "Instead of title and description" radio button.
9. Save changes and that's it.

Linux Mint -- some problems

Well, actually, there's aonly one problem and it's a strange one meaning I don't yet have an explanation or a fix.
This is that when I try to edit one of my blogs, the new post page is missing quite a lot of stuff.
For example, no Edit Html or Compose tabs are available -- none at all.
In addition, very few buttons are available on the page; just SpellCheck and Add Image and Preview. I've posted to Blogger Group Help about this but got no replies afetr 15 hours. This usually means it's not a common problem.
Other than that everything is working very well in Mint.

Edit: 24/02/08
I went back to Linux Mint today and the button problem had gone. No sign of it and everything seemed fine.
The reason I had gone back to Mint is because I had come across what seemed to be the problem which is a change to About:Config>User Prefs>BrowserJavaScript from 2 (normal) to 1. When it's on 1, there are all of these missing buttons in the blogger page. On the other hand, Gmail starts up considerably faster.
When I checked today in Mint the BrowserJS was at 2. Presuming it had been at 1 earlier, why was it at 1 and why did it change back?
No answers to this.