weblog

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Customizing Blogger to Power Your Static Website’s Blog

With all the great blogging platforms out there (Wordpress, MovableType, ExpressionEngine, etc.,) it’s easy to see why Google’s Blogger is often overlooked as a blogging solution. It’s simply not as customizable or as sexy as the others, but it has (or rather doesn’t have) something that makes it unique: it doesn’t require a server install or MySQL to run. You read that correctly: it doesn’t need a database to function. As such, it’s a great alternative for static HTML sites that don’t have access to MySQL as part of their hosting agreement who nonetheless still want to blog.

Another benefit of using Blogger is that it’s owned by Google, and Google owns search, so ostensibly it helps with search engine optimization; odds are good that your blog post, if titled correctly, will show up higher in Google’s search rankings, though don’t quote me on that. I’ve just had good luck myself with blog posts showing up quite nicely in the search results.

I don’t mean customization by way of themes either. If you’re a business, you don’t want a blog that looks like 3,000 others, you want it to look like the rest of your website. Blogger allows you to dramatically customize the blog template and actually tinker with the HTML. However, don’t try this unless you’re comfortable with HTML and CSS - if “View > Source” means nothing to you, I’d recommend sticking with a theme or hiring someone (like me!) to incorporate Blogger into your online presence.

Before we get started, you need to create a Blogger profile. Go to www.blogger.com to sign up and create a blog. Also important is to create a directory for Blogger to publish to on your website. I creatively called mine “blog.” Again, if these steps are foreign to you, hire someone to do it.

First thing to do is set up publishing. Go to Settings > Publishing > FTP Publishing. Here you’ll want to give some FTP details so Blogger can post your entries to your webserver. This is pretty self- explanatory. However, take it slow because details matter!

Once that’s set up, the next thing is to go to Template > Edit HTML. You should be viewing the source code of the blog template. Make sure you specify the path to your own CSS file in the head of the document. Add any site-specific elements, such as headers, navigation, footers, and so forth. Most likely you have a main content area in your HTML, and this is where you want to put the Blogger code. I opted to have a main content area and a little sidebar for archives. Simply give these areas IDs and insert the respective Blogger parts as need be. You can also comment out anything you don’t want displayed on your blog, such as “Powered by Blogger” and so forth.

This takes some time to fine-tune; you’ll most likely have to republish the blog several times to iron out any layout and font errors. Nonetheless, the Blogger template code is pretty straightforward to work with. In no time you’ll have a customized Blogger-powered blog on your static website!

 

Posted by Jesse on 10/11 at 02:01 AM

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