Would someone take a pathetic coding newb in hand please? *looking lost*

[GreenPartyVoter]

Ok, I signed up at blogger with the idea of starting some blogs to go with the liberal christians site. I picked a template I liked and have been randomly playing with the code to change fonts colors and sizes. I think I have that more or less the way I like it now, but there are some things I still wish to change.

There are four separate blogs and I have to publish the same template in each one to get them to match. This is fine cause if I screw up in my experiments I know I can grab a copy from one of the other ones. You can see the blogs here: http://www.hostdiva.com/liberalchristians/index.php?option=com_newsfeeds&Itemid=7

I want to get rid of the "about me" section in the sidebar because this will be a group blog as soon as I get some members, but when I erase that section in the code the Talk bit goes up too high and is no longer in line with the posts to the left. How do I correct that?

Also, I don't like how much space there is between the paragraphs. I would like to tighten it up a bit. I tried unchecking 'convert line breaks' in the blog control panel but then everything is smooshed together. It's like I can either have no space or too much space. Is there something I can put in the template code that would make the space still exist but be smaller?

I used to cheat with my coding by dumping stuff into FrontPage and just using the wysiwyg to eyeball everything. But in this case all this code with the $ keeps showing up in the text and whatnot. FP does not know how to read this code, so that leaves me with the trial and error method. It shouldn't take days and days to change font colors, make paragraphs tighter, and ditch a piece of the sidebar should it? :cry:

[mainegreen]

1. Don't ask for much, do you?

;-)

Well, just looking at the source, it seems to be busting out to line breaks (<br />'s) at the end of every paragraph, so you're not going to solve this through CSS. If I had to guess, its that you have a windows machine (I'm right aren't I?). Here's why I think this: windows does a dreaded \n\r at the end of every line. Most operating systems just use the new line character (\n) to end a line, but windows is stupid and does a new line/carriage return. Both, however, will be treated as a line break, hence the 2 <BR>'s after a paragraph. Either switch to an editor that doesn't generate multiple line breaks (there are some for windows, notepad might work) or tell the blogger not to convert line breaks, and instead just put <br>'s yourself at the end of your paragraphs. Either way, that's why you have that problem.

You'r profile container problem is more complex. There you are running up against CSS (formatting language) and layout issues. That's a pain and will take some work. I don't envy you there, especially as you are basically dealing with someone else's code (and near as I can tell, if someone else wrote it, it always sucks).

Good luck.

PS.
It's gotten rather chilly up here, hasn't it?

[welshTerrier2]

2. not an HTML expert but ...

with regard to the "About Me"/Profile section, it seems all you're trying to do is fill the space so that the "Talk bit" does not move up on the page ...

to this end, how about just including some kind of image to replace the undesired text? the code to do this would be very simple ...

the page you need to change is: http://lcnpolitics.blogspot.com/

the code you don't want is:

<div id="profile-container"> <h2 class="sidebar-title">About Me</h2> <dl class="profile-datablock"> <dd class="profile-data"> <strong>Name:</strong>LCNdiva </dd> </dl> <p class="profile-link"> <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/18602952">View my complete profile</a> </p> </div>

you could replace it with code like:

<IMG Height=150 SRC="Sunset.jpg" />

you might have to play around with the height or width tags on the new "img" tag ... btw, you would replace the "src" parameter with a pointer to some form of graphic image somewhere on the web ...

hope this helps ...