Doreen Michele

I have been going through my sites and updating labels. The reason: Multiple word labels with spaces create broken links, so you can't effectively share the list of posts under that label. I have been reducing labels to one word or running multiple words together. In one case, I simply deleted all labels from the site. A word to the wise: If at all possible, plan on one word labels for your site (as I wisely mostly did on  Street Life Solutions ).

I have a site called Project: SRO that I relaunched just yesterday. I think I started it sometime in 2017 and I didn't like the design and I wasn't clear what I was doing with it. I think it was initially some kind of black and beige design. I hoped to eventually update it. I was just trying to throw up something that was some minimal level of functional while I tried to flesh out the concept in my own mind and I knew that would take some time. Last summer, I pivoted the site to what I expected to be a temporary usage: A space to rant about local small town politics while losing my marbles during lockdown in a global pandemic. At that time, I updated the look to something sort of city-themed that I thought was pretty, but it wasn't really a good design from the perspective of really supporting a particular concept. It was a light and bright blue and white theme with a background that was an outline of part of Paris inclusive of the Eiffel Tower. I liked it but Par...

Labels can be useful for organizing information on your site and making it more discoverable and transparent for your audience. They show up and read an article about a particular topic and if they like it and it has a good label, they can click on the label to find other articles on the same subject which may be of interest to them. But sometimes when I reorganize a site, I don't like the labels I have been using. Then, when you go to pick a label, Blogger gives you a drop down list of all the labels you have ever used and it includes labels only found on draft posts. So if you have done a major reorganization and don't want those labels cluttering up your drop down list, you have to go back through all your draft posts and either delete or update all appearances of any labels you would like to permanently retire. That's the only way I know to get them out of your list. It's annoying, but it usually only takes a few minutes. It can be well worth the reductio...

The four newest BlogSpot themes are: Contempo, Soho, Emporio and Notable. Unlike previous themes, they are mobile optimized , so I no longer use the older themes. You can just use a default design package, but you can also easily insert an image of your choosing to customize your site. You can add your own image in a variety ways, such as in place of the Background, in an Image Widget or behind the Header. My sample Image for this post For simplicity's sake, all these screenshots are from a desktop PC. I am not including any screenshots from a smartphone. But if you are doing design work, always check both anytime you change anything. Contempo The background image for this theme is placed behind the header. The samples below are the second version of Contempo. Blogger Admin Panel Default With sample background image Using an Image widget above posts instead of a Background image As a Header background image Header background image paired wi...

Most of my earned income is made on the internet. I do some website work for local clients in the small town where I live, but most of it comes from resume editing, freelance writing and blogging and all of that gets done online. Trying to monetize creative work online, like blogging, is a constant challenge. One of the biggest stumbling blocks I keep running into is just trying to make it easy for people to give me money. It's surprisingly hard to make sure people can readily find that information. This post was written because I had someone email me and tell me they couldn't find that information ANYWHERE. They had looked! I verified my payment info for them and asked which of my many websites they had been on while looking for that information and they said it was my personal blog. I thought it was very prominently displayed on my personal blog. Well, maybe if you are on a PC with a big screen. Not so much if you are on a laptop, tablet or smartphone. They were...

I've been making little websites to serve up information on various topics for close to two decades. I'm basically a one-woman shop, so my websites have to be lean, evergreen, low cost and low maintenance to make any sense at all. I currently live in a small town and I sometimes attend public meetings where people are enamored of shiny tech but don't know how to use it. They get all envious of projects and talk in glowing terms about "Wouldn't it be GREAT if we did something like that?!" and I bite my tongue and don't say "You have no idea what on earth you are talking about. You have neither the resources nor the expertise to do a project like that." Those experiences inspired me to write this post. I would love to help people in the small town where I live to establish an effective web presence, but I really am going to need to do a lot of educating if that is ever going to happen. Most locals have no idea how to make a website that...

BlogSpot gives you a great deal of control over what you do with the website and serves all coding and design skill levels equally well. For people with zero skills, you can select from one of their existing themes. If you are a serious coder, you can click on "Edit HTML" under "Theme." For an intermediary level of customization, you can click on "Customize." It takes you to a dashboard where you can change elements of existing themes in a safe manner. If you don't like what you did, each section has an "undo" option called "Clear advanced changes to (section name)." In this dashboard, you can even add CSS styling with zero danger of permanently breaking your website. If you don't like what you have changed, you can just delete the CSS. Here are some examples of adding CSS styling to the Blockquote attribute. Example One Without CSS: With CSS: Example Two Without CSS: With CSS: Exa...

I have an old comic from a few years that I would like to get back to doing. The old comic is called Lil November and it is on one of the older BlogSpot themes, a theme that is not mobile optimized. Most of the comic isn't very good. This is the "above the fold" view of the first page I want to keep as seen on Lil November : Compared to the new site, it is cluttered and the comic is cut off when you first go to the page. You have to scroll down a bit to see the whole comic. This is the same page as seen on the new comic: Goals: I want to rename it, keep the only story arc I like and move it to a mobile optimized theme. A few months back, I chose a new name for the comic: The Cute and The Dead. It grew out of me and my sons cracking jokes about something. Initially, I was stymied. I thought it wouldn't be possible to do a comic on one of the mobile optimized themes. But I stuck with it and eventually found the following combination worked: Soh...