A DOC'S JOURNAL by Scott Solary

For the past 2 days, I've been trying to undo an attempt to spruce up my blog. It was a disaster! HTML and I are mortal enemies. What you see around this post is the result of battling both HTML's unreadable language (I know, it's not THAT hard) and CSS's proprietary nature.

I consulted all my closest sources (thanks Jimmy, Stu and Brent) and even put a question out into the LinkedIn cosmos, but to no real avail. You would think that there would be endless posts by bloggers using Movable Type ("the most difficult blogging software to customize") with template code and style sheets, but NO. Just the opposite is true. What there is is a lot of inside speak about tags and headers and such. You have to have a working knowledge of HTML and CSS to understand and perhaps if I did, I would've had this thing back up and sailing in an hour instead of the 2 days it took me.

Then I finally came across this STYLE GENERATOR! It took a few tries of customizing to get the CSS that worked, but this is the "code generating savior" to all people like me who find HTML a daunting enigma.

(IMPORTANT: Before you go changing your code, open a Stickie, Word Pad or Doc and paste the old code into it. If I would have done this, I would not have been in this situation in the first place. Once you have all the code in a safe place, do what you want, because you can always go back! )

Once you have generated the code, paste it into the template called "STYLE SHEET". Check all your templates, Go to the pull-down menu and "REFRESH TEMPLATES" & "REBUILD TEMPLATES". I don't think both steps are necessary, but that's what I did. I then clicked "REBUILD SITE". Refresh the blog and voila!! A "new" blog.

After that worked, it was time to try and tweak the HTML again. The "Monthly Archive" was above the "Recent Posts" and "Categories" was after that and there was no field to insert a picture. I opened the MAIN INDEX template and found the blocks of HTML that mentioned the aforementioned sections and started re-arranging (cut and paste) them in the order I preferred. The "Search" field seems to hold all the info for the column and couldn't be moved easily without messing the whole column up, so I left it there. I also decided to paste the code that MT generates when you upload a picture with the "Search" code. It worked!!

I hope this info helps others like me who are not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination.

** obviously some of this has changed since I first publish this post. The search box doesn't hold the info for the column. The column info was just directly above it. Your best bet is to have someone that can come over and decipher the code. This will work if you find yourself in a bind like I was. Good luck.