Blogging Tips

Most blogs use a single stylesheet to control the design of their entire site. That is where all the magic happens. If you have ever gotten adventurous and wanted to modify your theme, you have no doubt poked around in your blogs stylesheet. Obviously, this is a very important file, so you should be careful with your editing.

Make a backup first

Even if you really know what you are doing, it’s always a good plan to have a backup copy of a version of your stylesheet that you know is in good shape. I like to keep backups in dated folders on my local hard drive, so I know exactly what date I copied the file off the server. You might as well keep these backups around, they are just text files so they take up hardly any room and who knows when you might need them again.

Sometimes you can make edits to your CSS file and think everything is fine, only to discover a page somewhere on your blog that is broken a week later. You’ll be glad you have that back up then. Which leads me to…

After making edits, look at ALL your blogs pages

OK maybe you don’t need to look at every single post in your archives, but at the very least you should look at:

• The homepage
• Many of your single posts
• A “Page” (WordPress)
• Category page
• Archive page

You should also try to find posts in your archives that make use of things you might not use all the time. View a post with images, ordered lists, unordered lists, definition lists, code samples, etc.

Indent all new or edited rules

If you change one of your CSS properties, give it a little nudge to the right to indicate this a new change and is in a trial period. Then later, after you are happy with the change, you can go back and move it back.

You could also add a comment…or both.

.post li {
    margin: 2px 0px 0px 15px;
    color: #990;
         text-transform: uppercase; /* Just seeing how this looks */
    text-indent: 15px;

“Going commando” vs. Editing local copy

Applications like Coda (mac) make logging into your server and editing live (commando-style) a very easy thing to do. This is a very satisfying way to work, since you can see the fruits of your labor instantly on the web. But of course this is also the most dangerous way to work. Bork your site, and visitors will see it immediately.

If you want to be 100% safe with your edits, you may want to consider installing your blogging platform on your local machine and making your changes there before publishing to the web. If you use WordPress, there are solutions on doing this for Windows here and on a Mac here.

Just do it.

You shouldn’t be afraid of jumping into your stylesheet and playing around. I just want to make sure you do it safely and are prepared in case anything bad happens. In fact, the more prepared you are for disaster, the more adventurous you can be!