Modifying The Blogger Template – Tag Structure

There will come a time when you find yourself staring at your template code on the Layout – Edit HTML page. Perhaps what you see there confuses you, or maybe you know what your doing but have hit a snag. Either way, you cannot save your template when you have errors. So what can you do? Learn a little HTML for starters.

Please note, it’s probably best to read this in a nice quiet area where you can focus on the content. You may not know it, but this is borderline programming here. I don’t want to scare anyone away, but you really need to pay attention to posts like these if you are to get the full benefit of the content. You can’t skim text and learn programming at the same time. I’ve tried, it doesn’t work. hahaha

If you thought you could operate your blog without knowing any HTML, well, you’re right, you can. If you want to enhance and modify your template yourself though, you will be best served learning some of the basics of HTML and the nuances of Blogger.

For instance, when you first view the Layout – Edit HTML page, you’ll probably see something similar to this:

* Blogger Template Style
* Name: TicTac (Blueberry)
* Author: Dan Cederholm
* URL: www.simplebits.com
* Date: 1 March 2004
* Updated by: Blogger Team
*/

What is all this jibber-jabber you might ask? What you see there are the first few lines of my template for the Views on Life blog. For the most part, you can ignore the first few lines in the above snippet. I want you to take a look at the or self-closing).

What does that mean? Well, a bit of HTML markup (as it’s called) always has a starting tag and a closing tag. What you find in between these two tags is the meat of the statement. Let’s break down the

First thing we need to understand is that all HTML tags require a beginning and and ending. This allows browsers to interpret and know where something starts, and where it ends, and most importantly, what it is. The

That’s all there is to it! You end with the exact same tag, except that you add a forward slash to it. This is your beginning and ending tags for the title HTML statement. This is also how MOST of the HTML tags you’ll use are going to be put together. With a beginning and ending formatted exactly like this.

I say most tags are like this, but there are exceptions. For instance, the tag, which displays an image on your page, is self-closing. Self-closing? What in the world am I talking about? Again, here’s an example.

Notice that I don’t have a ending tag on that statement. Instead, I can end the tag by adding a slash before the starting tag ends. The reason we don’t have an ending tag for the tag is because the , when properly formed (syntactically correct), will contain all it needs to know to do its job, which is to display an image.

Conversely, the

For Blogger templates, you’ll notice that we have a tag in between our beginning and ending

This is perfectly valid as well, and the text found in between the beginning and ending