**Important: some Blogger tips and tricks that will help you format your blog posts legibly & beautifully

   

 Hi everyone! Here are a few tips and tricks you might like for blog design:

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A simple but important tip!

If you are pasting text into your blog for your assignments (for example, from a Word document or another word processing app), sometimes it needs reformatting to be readable on your blog. It's easy to do:

• Paste your text into a blog post --> ***Update: First save your Word document (under "Save As") as a Plain Text (.txt) document. Then copy and paste the text from the .txt document... it doesn't seem to work directly from Word anymore!
• Highlight the text

• Go to the Blogger formatting bar at the top of your new post, and click on the three dots, then on  icon of a capital T with a diagonal bar through it -- the "clear formatting" icon. That will put the newly-pasted text into the default format your blog uses (the font, colour, spacing etc. for your blog theme). 

Alternatively, if you want to post text and keep its original formatting, you can:

• Post your Word doc or PDF or other document to your Google Drive
• "Share" it so that "anyone with the link can view" and copy the sharing URL
• Then paste the URL into your blog post, and readers can access the document via your Google Drive
• If you want to really get fancy, you could type something (like 'Here is my document'), highlight those words, and go to the 'link' icon at the top of your new post screen (looks like a link of chain). It will prompt you to paste your Google Drive URL into a box on screen... and then you will have a hot link that takes the reader directly to your Google Drive document.

Note that you can post links to documents, photos, slides, videos -- just about any kind of computer file this way.

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You might be interested to learn how to get rid of the 'copies' of blog posts that appear at the bottom of our blog screens. Here's how:

Blogger has made it a default to add 'most popular posts' and 'top posts' to the bottom of blog screens. This might make sense for people who run large-scale, more commercialized blogs, but it's not relevant for us. 

You don't necessarily have to remove these, but you are welcome to do so, and it tidies up the screen a bit. Here's how to do it:

1. Go to your dashboard by pressing "Design"
2. Go to "Layout"
3. Look at the "gadgets" in the sidebar and at the bottom of the screen in Layout mode. There must be a box or two at the bottom of the screen that say "Most popular posts" or "Top posts", something like that. Delete them if you don't want to see one or more of your posts repeated!
4. Similarly, there must be a gadget that repeats the blog title in the right sidebar. Delete it if you don't want that!
5. Don't forget to save your layout by clicking on the weird little floppy disc 'save' icon in the bottom right corner of your screen before your leave "Layout" mode.

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Blog posts are generally considered more appealing if they are illustrated -- with a photo, drawing, diagram, etc. You can use your own photos or find something online, but please make sure that you are not violating copyright by 'grabbing' something you like online!

When you do a Google image search, click on the "Tools" box, and then the arrow for "Usage Rights". Then click on the drop-down menu choice, "Creative Commons licenses". This will restrict the images to ones where the photographers/creators have agreed that others can freely use and share them -- so you should be safe to use the Creative Commons licensed images.

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To save your work as you go when making blog posts:

• Go to the 'Preview' button at the top right corner of the page, and click the downward arrow to the right of it. You'll get a drop-down menu with the choice to 'preview' or 'save/ update'. Choose 'save/ update' and your new blog post in progress will be saved. If you have a long or complicated post, it's good to save as you go several times.
  
  
• There is sometimes an image of an old-fashioned floppy disc (usually in the bottom right corner of the screen?) If you hover over that image, you should have the word "save" appear. That is another way to save things on your blog!

That's it for now!