Who knew? Not me! I’ve had my own domain for over a year, and CSS is still a mystery to me. A blog friend asked me if I knew how she could double-space her post text, and I suggested she contact another friend of ours who creates blog themes.

Turns out that what we think of as “spacing”, a holdover from typewriter days, is actually padding coded in between the lines of text. Like this:

In your style.css file, look for this part:

div#blog #blog_left .text{
color:#7f7f7f;
font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:11px;
line-height:24px;
padding-top:5px;
padding-bottom:5px;
padding-left:3px;
}

Change the line height to 15px.

Now look for this part (it’s down just a little).

Quote:
div#blog #blog_left .text p{
padding:0px;
margin:0px;
}

Change the padding to 5px. That’s it.

One of these days, CSS is going to make sense to me, I just know it

Google pissed off a lot of people with this last Page Rank update. Blogs were seeing their PR drop once, and then a week later, drop again, and in some cases, drop a third time. And while some blogs did actually gain page rank, like my product review blog MomReviews (look at me, plugging my other blogs) which went from 0 to 2, but it seems like the majority dropped like stones.

Which is leading many people to want to boycott Google altogether. I was surprised to find that the number one way that people are getting to my blog Table for Five (oops, I did it again) is by using a search engine called Super.Info.  It’s a company in Birmingham, England. I did a search for “lead free toys”, and it returned four results. A similar search on Google returned 1,230,000.

But, here’s the really cool thing. I put “Table for Five” into Super.Info, and it returned 53 results and they were all my posts! And, it showed how many comments each post got, and the first names of anyone who subscribed to the comments. Now THAT is really cool. Count me in as a fan of Super.Info!

I’m loving this new theme I found, called OceanWide. I found it at ThemeBox, and it was created by Romow. I think the water and the fish are a nice soothing image to look at, especially on those days when I’ve been online for 16 hours.

I’m also grateful to BlueHost for having Fantastico, which installed WP 2.3.1 on this blog with one click. Every single time I attempt to manually upgrade, I screw it up. Every time. So I’m happy to wait until Fantastico can do it for me.

Kudos to the developers of 2.3 for adding a tagging field to the Write Post page. The only thing I don’t know is how they work. Are they Technorati tags? I need to find that out.

Ever since I started using Wordpress, one thing that has baffled me is sidebar widgets. I understood the heading and the text, but I didn’t know how to style any of the text itself.

And then one day I copy pasted a recipe into the post area on another of my blogs, and when I looked at the code, I saw that around the words “Ingredients” and “Directions” were the letter “h” with tags around it. A lightbulb went on in my head, seriously. So THAT’S how you make larger text within a widget!

I still have to really look at the stylesheet to understand it for sure. Does the “h” tag use the coding for titles? On my blog Table for Five, h1 is large dark grey letters, but h2 is light purple, and I’m not sure why. But I figured it out, all by myself. Go me!

This is the h1 tag

This is the h2 tag

This is the h3 tag

This is the h4 tag