Amazon discontinued the ability to create images using their SiteStripe feature and in their infinite wisdom broke all previously created images on 12/31/23. Many blogs used this feature, including this one. Expect my archives to be a hot mess of broken book cover images until I can slowly comb through 20 years of archives to make corrections.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Surviving The HTML Jungle

I've been blogging for five and half years. This means two things. One, I have no life and two, all those monthly archive links on my side bar were starting to annoy me. It was starting to get a touch unwieldy, and I like to keep my side bar as "tidy" as possible (hence the deletion of the blog roll after I discovered the joys of a feed reader).

Then, I saw Lori's new blog. Her archives are a drop down menu! Oh. My. Gawd. How do I get a drop down menu? Want. Need. Must. Have.

Now for those of you who are using Blogger's new "Layouts" design, this is very easy to do. Just go to your layout, click on archives, and you can change it there. Me? Um, yeah - remember that bit about blogging for five and half years? I have not updated to layouts because I'm not sure how it would work with my custom template. Yep, that means Wendy's template is still in good, old-fashioned, HTML.

Let me just say, for the record, I am a code moron. My feeble wittle brain just cannot handle code. It's really "hard" for me to grasp it as a concept, let alone put it into practice. That said? I am the Queen Of Copy And Paste, and the Internet is full of people whose brains can handle code. So I borrow quite a bit.

For those of you who covet the drop down menu, and aren't on the new Blogger Layouts format, I swiped the drop down menu code from here. It was surprisingly easy to "install." Hell, I did it this morning, before I had my caffeine! Of course then I spent the next half hour tinkering with all the other stuff on my side bar, but that's neither here nor there.

I am so happy that I now have my archives in a drop down menu. Yes, I really am that easy to please. And it's all thanks to Lori. Hopefully I haven't scarred her for life.

7 comments:

Nicole said...

Hey, it looks good.

How do you add the nice pic beneath the "What I'm Reading" bar?

Wendy said...

More fun with HTML!

Nicole: I generate my cover images using Eli's Amazon link generator. It spits out the code for me, and all I have to do is copy and paste it into my template.

http://tinyurl.com/9y7yy

Just put in the Amazon product URL or the 10-digit ISBN.

If you're not an Amazon Associate, you can leave that field blank and it will still work.

Marg said...

I used to copy and paste everything as well! Now that I have upgraded to the new version it is really easy to update all the various elements.

I do love the drop down archive box. I might look into that later.

Nicole said...

Thanks. I've used Eli's, just tend to forget about it.

Lori said...

Is copying code not the greatest?! I could not survive in my job without it :)

So glad to be of service, LOL!!

The Booknerd said...

I'm so happy you posted this. I've been trying to de-clutter the appearance of my blog for a while now, so I jumped on your brain wave and did a drop down archive... you're right, that's much, much better.

Wendy said...

Booknerd: Glad to be of assistance!