Modify an Existing Template

So you're already bored with the way your blog looks? Ready to experiment with ways to make your blog stand out? Read on, brave one...

Modifying an Existing Blog Template

The easiest way to modify a blog template is to use our free Blog.Mac Template Editor. Blog.Mac templates were designed to be as generic as possible using commonly-agreed upon blog formats. For this same reason however, some blog templates that you try to use with Blog.Mac might not work precisely as you hope, but luckily these problems are easily resolved.

Blog.Mac templates are text files containing CSS code. If you view the source of a typical blog, you'll see similar CSS code between the following tags:

<style type="text/css">
...CSS Code...
</style>

Blog.Mac adds flexibility to your blog by allowing you to import CSS code from other CSS text files. When you first ran Blog.Mac, it installed 15 variations of templates to a new "blog" folder. Inside these CSS files, you'll see dozens of definitions for different styles, like "#body" and "#footer" to define chunks of your blog, or individual unit definitions like "a" and "h1" to define how hyperlinks or headings look on your blog (refer to the Template Tag reference for more information).

With this information, you can open the CSS code file in a text editor and edit the areas of interest to change the look and feel of your blog. As you make edits, open your blog's "Template and Publish" tab, browse to the revised CSS file and "Preview" your blog to see the results of your edits (be sure you don't "Publish" your blog unless you want the on-line version to change).

Once you're done modifying your template and you'd like to share it with the rest of the Blog.Mac community, be sure to send us a link. If we like it (and we probably will), we'll post it on our Template Center.