Gardeners guide to blogging Pt 1

So after my blog makeover the past couple days I thought, wouldn't it be nice to share what I know with my readers?  Now now don't get crazy over there.  I am no expert.  But I am great researcher and will post tons of links for you all.  So buckle your seat belts, let the top down, put your hair in a pony, hold on to your nickers and enjoy the ride down the blogging super highway!  Here we go!

First stop... Leelou blogs.
I have searched high and low for a beautiful blog I could do myself.  Cause let's face it ladies, I'm a stay at home mom of three children living on a single income that my dear Mr Garden works his hiney off for.  Occasionally I sell some furniture that brings in enough money to splurge at goodwill ha!  So I'm a self blogger. 

I have stopped by many (un-named) blogs with banners, backgrounds and blinkies.  And after playing around I've decided it's just too darn hard to find a background and banner that all matches and lines up nicely. 

So I've gotten comfortable with "XML" templates.  This changes your entire layout.  The banner, the background, the widget headers (these are the little banners in your columns that say, ABOUT ME etc...).  Everything ebs and flows together. 

The only difference is that installing a template is a little different and can be intimidating to a first timer.  This is where I suggest making a back up of your current blog template and save it to your desktop just in case you need to re-install it.  Or you can set up what bloggers call a "practice blog".  This blog you can mess up, screw up and experiment here with cool blogger tips.

Here is how you will download a copy of your current template... Click on the Design/Layout tab on your blogger site.  There you will see a link that says "EDIT HTML"

Double click picture to enlarge.

Next you will see a text box full of code you will not understand.  This is not Chinese, it is what I would consider a foreign language though.  There is another link up top on this screen that says "DOWNLOAD FULL TEMPLATE".  You want to click on that and tell your computer where to save the file.  I recommend naming it something you will remember and putting it somewhere you will remember as well.  I either use my Desktop or My Documents.

Now you can CTRL+A in the text box and delete everything.  You will click on the "Browse" button and find your new template "XML" file on your computer and "Upload" it.  There are usually instructions that come in a file with your new downloaded template as well. 

You may get a message that says you will loose all your widgets, it will be in red.  If so scroll to the bottom of the message and click to keep the widgets.

Next... preview your blog and make sure all is functioning as it should be and then you can save!

After many tanks of internet fuel and driving through some super shady blog towns I finally found Leelou blogs.  Leelou has a bunch of great templates and they are free!  If you like my page then you will love this site.  Please go check them out.

I heard once that the human brain can only memorize ten items at a time comfortably.  I wouldn't want to be the cause for any eye twitching or thumb sucking in the corner so were going stop here today.