Blog Spring Cleaning: Finished! + tips & tricks (from others)

Well for a while anyway. So this is it. I have finished tinkering and playing with the layout of my blog and wanted to tell you about the final changes made. If  you’re new to blogging (on blogger)  but fancy revamping your blog a little, you  might find (or not) some of the following useful.

	You will have noticed a new menu bar at the top, with 2 new options  'makeup looks' which directs you to a 'preview' page of makeup looks  thumbnails, with a read more option if you fancy reading the whole post  instead of just the preview.   If your blog is also hosted on blogger  like mine and if you are interested to have this also on your blog,  it's called 'auto read more with thumbnails' Interested to have the  same on your blog? I followed a combination of these 2 tutorials here &  here. To follow those, you will need previous knowledge of html and  also awareness of 'label pages'.
	On the right, 2 new options to browse my blog: browse by brand and  browse by category (ramblings, rants, nail post etc). This is basically  organising all the labels of your choice in a neat one-line drop down  menu. For that, I followed the tutorial on here at Blogger Sentral (yes, it’s spelt with a S) I would like to thank katiechou from  mylipsbutbetter.com for letting me know about the amazing  mine of information which is Blogger Sentral.
	And finally, a totally pointless new addition but one which I have been wanting for ages. My blog has now a favicon. What's that? It's the little leaf icon you will see on most browsers when you read my blog. I've chosen a little leaf, in keeping with the 'garden' theme. 'leaf' also starts with the letter L like my name. (Too much time in my hands, what can i say? ) Fancy having a favicon too? I followed this tutorial to install mine.
	Learn from my mistakes: If you fancy a change of layout, this is what I have found useful:
	Please, please, please will you back up your existing template before you start mucking around  with  your existing template  and then panic on twitter, like I did? Yep, some kind soul has written a tutorial on how to do back your existing template.  Make a separate note somewhere of all the contents of all your widgets which are installed on your template. If you have used html/javascript, copy the code, paste and save into a quick .txt file.
	Create a new blog which you will use just for testing purposes. I was very scared about creating a new blog but it was easy. On your  dashboard, just click on 'create a blog' and it will create your NEW blog  under your existing profile.   No need to create a second Google account  you can just have multiple blogs under the same profile, which until 1  week ago I had no clue about and no confidence either of trying in case  I mess up my existing Google profile. If you're wondering 'what happens  when I comment on a blog'? Nothing. As my friends on twitter reassured  me, you're commenting under your profile name not under your blog name.

Further Information

• The fonts I am using (since some of you asked): header: ‘ma sexy’
  main text: ‘nobile’ (as part of these fancy new fonts you don’t need to install to use them on your blog and been displayed on the web –>  more info here)
  blog title font: ‘coming soon’ (Google web fonts)
  
   
• Getting to know the parts of a blogger blog: the basics
• What the hell is a label and adding label (category) tabs to  navigation bar
• Creating navigation or menu tabs in blogger
• Change the width of your blog - make your blog wider
• Remove "subscribe to: Posts (Atom)"
• Remove 'showing posts with label XYZ’ on Blogger

I hope this has been useful to some of you and not boring or patronising. Now that I achieved the modifications that I wanted, there  is no excuses, normal blogging should resume, eek