28 Sep 2009

wider blog with blogspot to post large pictures

I have been helping putting a blog together (http://america-me-voila.blogspot.com/ awesome blog by the way).

It is fairly simple for somebody who knows a little bit about web development, but it's much more difficult for a designer.
I strongly believe it should be easier.

Below are the steps to do so:
  1. Start with the minima template
  2. Click on "Edit the HTML" under layout
  3. Update the header-wrapper width to 1200px (for example)
  4. Update the outer-wrapper width to 1200px
  5. Update the main-wrapper width to 980px (you need to keep some space for the side bar  (220px) if you have one)
  6. Then for each post that you want to do with wide images (illustrations in this case)
    1. You need to upload the image with the size you want to a different host (flickr for example)
    2. Then get the URL of the image.
    3. Go back to blogger, create you message
    4. Click on the upload image logo, instead of uploading the image from your computer, add the image from the web with the URL you copied from your hosting service (flickr in our case).
    5. Click Upload Image. 

I wonder why blogspot doesn't make it easier.
I could definitely see a tool to resize each of the boxes in your template and then i don't know why they have to resize your pictures when you upload them from the computer. It's Google after all, they should be able to handle the cost!