Helpful Blogging Hints for the New Blogger Interface

 

I know so many of you are learning the new Blogger Interface. I've been seeing a few helpful hints around some other blogs that I thought I would share with you. 

On the new blogger, the word 'normal' comes up at the top when you first open the post-draft page. When you click in the body of the draft page it switches to 'paragraph'. You have to switch it back to 'normal' in the drop down menu to get single space at the top of the page instead of the double space I had been getting when adding pictures at the top of the page.

For things like Youtube videos. Switch to HTML, I have to use the HTML format to change the size of the Youtube videos that I sometimes put on my blog. It's the pencil icon on the far left top area when you are on the draft page. This the size that I like my videos. I'll show you how I did this. 

On the Youtube page, click share and then embed. Copy the embed code and come back to the Blogger page. Click on the pencil icon and switch to HTML and paste the embed code on the page. 

The code circled in the big red circle is the embed code. The small red arrow is pointing at the width number that you can change to make the video narrower. It's automatically starts with 560 but I erased that number and added 350 instead. That makes the video the right size for me but you can change it to whatever number works for you. 

Now you can see that I changed the number. When you are done, you just go back to where the pencil icon was, it now shows this symbol ( < > ) instead of the pencil. Just click on the drop down menu and click on "Compose view" to get back to the regular draft page. 

Pictures seem to be giving a lot of people problems and I can see why. They keep changing things. Now when you click on a picture on the draft page it turns blue and has dots around it. This is so you can resize it. But you can also click on that middle button that comes up on the picture with the drop down menu and pick from small, medium, large and extra large. I usually pick large for my pictures. But I don't click on that until I have added any words I want to under the picture on the page because it sometimes messes up what I'm writing. It's turned my paragraphs blue and the whole thing was underlined. So now I wait until I've added all the commentary about the pictures and then click on them to resize them or to right align or left align a picture. To get rid of the blue on the picture, just click away from the picture anywhere else on the draft page and it will disappear.

If you want to delete a picture, just click below the picture, not on it and backspace until it's gone. I used to be able to click on the picture and delete it but I can't do that anymore. 

So those are a couple of things that I have seen on blogs that have been problems for people and I found fixes for them either from other blogs or just from clicking around and figuring it out.  I hope this helps.