Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Colors for Contributors

Apologies to our readers who won't care about this post, but this is the easiest way to get ahold of all our contributors at once concerning the color of posts text. Sadly, Blogger has been absolutely, 100% useless in offering any support on this. This is probably my greatest dissapointment yet in dealing with them. Despite several emails, the have not even once replied with any notice that I exist. But, thankfully, another blogger has offered me a hand. Unfortunately, it's not the perfect matter it was before, but we now each have a color text.

We will each need to put a tiny bit of code before and after our posts in order to accomplish this. The code is as follows...

Any time that in your post you place < div id=yourcolor > at the beginning and < /div > at the end of that text (Without the spaces before and after the < and >), you will create the font color and background color that you want. I have given each of you an easy to remember ID...Your names. For example, if Nomad wants to post, he simply needs to use the above code with 'nomad' as the ID and then

he will be typing in his prefered color.

The same goes for each of us. I have tinkered with Nomad's previous post to demonstrate and I would encourage each contributor to play around as need be to get comfortable with this fix. As I said, not a perfect solution, but we can at least have our colors back with a minimal amount of extra junk tossed in at the very beginning and very end of a post.

11 comments:

Sean said...

Ward there's an easier way of accomplishing this so that it will be automatic. Here's how:

Create a class for each contributer exactly the way Blogger spells there name, with capitalization etc... So mine would be .Sean . In the class simply put the font color each of them is getting. So it would look like this for me.

.Sean { color: #cea63a; }

Then in the template find where it says:

<div class='post hentry'>

Add <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> inside of the quotes like this:

<div class='post hentry <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$>'>

Save the template. Poster colors should be working then.

Sean said...

If you don't decide to use the fix that I posted above you should make all of the contributors use classes rather than ids because technically there is only supposed to be one instance of an id on a page, while there can be multiple instances of a class. So the change for that would be to replace the # signs with single periods. Then we just need to us class='yourname' rather than id='yourname'.

Nomad said...

Thanks, Ward. Thanks Sean. Either solution works for me. I am just glad to have the colors back. Let me know which way we want to go.

Ward said...

Sean, that's what I was doing with it previously but the 'new blogger' seems to outright reject that code from working with the template upgrade. With the new templates, there seems to be no place for that original coding. If you can find some way to work the code within the new framework, I'd be happy to put the code in, but so much of that coding that you pointed to which used to be in the html is no longer there.

Sean said...

ward, i just did this with my blogger blog (that i basically only use for this sort of situation), so i'm curious why it's not working. i'll do some more checking and see what i can find.

quizwedge said...

cool. now I can steal other bloggers' colors. :)

quizwedge said...

I agree with Sean about it being a class instead of an id. Can we get it changed to classes?

Sean said...

ward,

i see the problem and i'm working on it. i should have a solution tonight.

Ward said...

Cool, if you can get something but don't want to mess with the coding on the site, probably emailing it to me would be the best option. We'll be hitting bed early tonight since we're heading back east from our visit with Muse's family. But that would let me get to it tomorrow evening.

Anonymous said...

I, for one, am looking forward to the return of the colors. :-)

Nomad said...

And of course, let us not forget the easier trick of < font = darkred > {Content here} < / font > which is what I have been using. Much safer and more permanent.