Putting files into Blogger's root directory

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog.

Turnips (Brassica rapa) 
from Wikimedia commons 
Originally posted to Flickr 
by thebittenword.com.   
Licensed under the terms of 
the cc-by-2.0.

If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory.   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this.

Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger.

Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself.

How to add a file to your blog's root directory

The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot do this".

 The long answer is still no:  "there is no way to do this, but see the rest of this article for an explanation of why, and some suggested work-arounds."

Why not? Every other website tool lets me do this.

Posts:  Blogger's tool for managing
the content on our blogs

If you're clever, and have lots of time, you can make a website just using a text-editor like notpad, a graphics programme, and ftp software that lets you put the files into the right places on computer that's connected to the internet.

Tools like Dreamweaver take away a lot of the time-consuming work, and some of the need for cleverness.  But you still need to know a lot about the internet to do things in a way that makes a good website.

Content management systems make this easier still: they let a technically-minded person do the nuts-and-bolts work to make the website, and give authors / artists / editors / content-creators simpler-to-use tools that let them put "stuff" (ie content) into the website, without needing to worry about the details of how it works.

Blogger is a (very simple) website content-management system, it creates our web-pages for us based on data that we put into certain places. Administrators can set up and change templates, other people, eg authors simply make posts.

When we use Blogger, the main way that we change the data in our web-pages is using the Blogger software. 

Some items inside posts or gadgets can be changed using other software, eg Google Docs, provided they were were set up using that other software in the first place. But - key point - there is nothing in the way that Blogger is put together that means we need to access the base directory. So they don't let us do so.    And I doubt that this this will change anytime soon.

What to do instead

The options for getting around this restriction depend on how the file that you need to put into your root directory is intended to be used.

Installing code

If you have code to install into your blog, and a file to go with it, then you just need to

1. Host the file somewhere else (maybe in your Picasa-web-album for the blog, if it's a picture)
2. Change the code to point to the full path of where you have hosted the file, instead of the relative path used in the code

For example, here is the code for a button linking to my blog, with the picture in the root directory:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="//Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

To change this to use a specific location, I just add a file-path and the file-name of the picture wherever it is hosted.

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglPP9ygY8vZu4QNY3RhdgLrbYo5Q3Q0cbOI2M2nYV15zf5mm6GY797gTfyNsn5IdDwUSJwNCSrJFmUZwaH1pIfNjlo0FYdRLfaefo83C68HoRSpGbxMaW-udzWquVTUlucOF8CtE91VQUa/s320/Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

TIP: blogger's editor sometimes gets links mixed up, so it's important to start the filepath with "http://"

Verifying ownership

If someone wants to use a file's position to check that you control a website, then they will have code on their own website that looks for the file in your root directory.

You cannot change this code. And you cannot place the fie.

So you need to ask them for an alternative way to verify, that is suitable for people without root directory access.

 If they don't have any alternatives, try lobbying for this on their product support forum:  by not having alterantives, they are ensuring that Blogger users, among others, cannot use their service.

If the official answer is still "no", then you could also ask in other on-line forums if anyone has found any other work-arounds.


What other reasons have you found for installing files to your root directory?   
What work-arounds have worked for you?

An afterthought: what isn't recommended

I've recently seen someone suggest in a help forum that people with custom domains can put files into their blog's root directory by FTP'ing the files into place.

 This may be true, if the service that you are purchasing from your domain registrar includes file-hosting. But file hosting(*)

1. Isn't necessary for a custom domain used in Blogger (since Google hosts our files for us), and
2. Isn't available as part of the services when you buy a custom-domain through Blogger.

So it's not a general solution for most Blogger users, though it may work for some.

Initially I was a little sceptical of the idea: Blogger doesn't expect to see any files in our root directory, so I was concerned that it might do strange things if it found them there. But on reflection, I think there is probably a low risk of this happening, since the file-location is outside Blogger's control.

(*) To avoid any confusion, file hosting and DNS hosting are not the same thing. If you buy a custom domain for your blog from a registrar without going through Google/Blogger, then you do need to pay for DNS hosting, but do not need to buy file-hosting.

---

Related Articles

File hosts - places to store files used in your blog.

Picasa-web-albums: a quick introduction

How Blogger data is organised

Setting up a new administrator for your blog

Options for letting other people write in your blog

How to change or remove the Newer Post and Older Posts links

This article explains how to hide or change the format of the "Older Posts" and "Newer Post" and "Home" links that are shown at the bottom of Blogger blogs with Layout or Designer templates.

Why are the older and newer posts links used

Most designer and layout templates have links at the bottom of your page of blog posts which let readers navigate back and forward among the list of posts.

This is basic to how a blog is intended to work:  you post regularly, and give people a way to get back to previous posts.

The pager-links are particularly important on pages that are reached using the Label or Archive gadgets, which may show more posts than you normally have on your home page, or displaying in your blog.

But some people want to remove them - and this is fine provided readers have other ways of navigating around the blog.

How to remove "Newer Posts" and "Older Posts" from your blog

To totally remove these items, you just add some new CSS rules to your template in the usual way.

To remove "Older Posts" add:

#blog-pager-older-link {
float: right;
}

To remove "Newer Posts" add:

#blog-pager-older-link {
float: right;
}

Or to remove both of them and the "Home" link that appears in between them, add:

#blog-pager {
display: none;
}

How to format the "Newer Posts" and "Older Posts"

Changing the way that these links look is very similar, you just add the same codes, except instead of 

display: none;

you need to use the CSS element for the effect you want.   For example, to make the text bigger and bold, you might use rules like

font-size: 150%;
font-weight: bold;

You need to put these commands inside the curly brackets, where the display: none; is now - make sure that each component has a semi-colon at the end of it.   It makes the code easier to read if each component is on a new line, but this isn't necessary.

Another option is to swap the "float" commands around to put "older posts" on the left and "newer posts" on the right (I've never quite understood why they were the other way around).

You can also use background images and colours, with elements like:

background-image:url('URL OF YOUR IMAGE');

background-color:#cccccc;

How to change the "Newer Posts" and "Older Posts" text

If you want to change the text values - either to different words, or by replacing them totally with pictures, you need to accept the disadvantages of editing your template.   If this is ok, and you you want to proceed then:

1  Edit your template in the usual way

2  Replace the existing links:

• To replace the "newer posts" link, find <data:newerPageTitle/>  in your template, and replace it with whatever text you want.
  
• To replace the "older posts" link, find <data:olderPageTitle/>  in your template, and replace it with whatever text you want.  
  
• To replace the "home" link, find <data:homeMsg/>  in your template, and replace it with whatever text you want.   

In each case, the code you are replacing will be inside some other code, like this:

  <span id='blog-pager-newer-link'>
      <a class='blog-pager-newer-link' expr:href='data:newerPageUrl' expr:id='data:widget.instanceId + &quot;_blog-pager-newer-link&quot;' expr:title='data:newerPageTitle'><data:newerPageTitle/></a>
      </span>

Make sure that you only replace exactly the code listed above, including the < and >'s.   The other code around sets up the links to the actual older or newer posts, and you don't want to change this.

Also, if you want to use a picture instead, replace it with <img alt='...' border='0' src='THE URL OF YOUR PICTURE'/> - of course with the right picture URL put in.

Do make sure that the meaning of your pictures is obvious though - what may look like a cute "newer posts" symbol to you might be totally meaningless to someone else.

---

Related Articles

How to add a CSS rule to your template

How to edit your blogger template

Understand the advantages and disadvantages of template editing

Finding the URL of a picture in Picasa-web-albums

Understanding designer and layout templates

Giving your Blog a Home Page

This article is about the options for setting the home page for blogs made with Google's Blogger.

Blogs don't have a "home page", main page or "landing page" in the same way that regular web-sites do.  Instead, they show the newest post first, since (hopefully!) most readers will be return visitors, coming back to see what's new.

But there may be blogs/websites where you want a welcome message or a particular post to appear first whenever someone visits your blog, or where you want to put all your posts in reverse order.

This article is about options for giving your Blogger blog a "home page".

It lists three options, and gives advantages/disadvantages of each approach, and links to articles with details about implementing each case. If you can think of any more approaches, please leave a comment below.

Options for giving your blog a home page include:

• Static page combined with a custom re-direct - as discovered by Nitecruzr.
  This was my recommended method of home-page implementation for a while.   However it does not work on mobile templates.   So if your blog has a mobile template - and you want mobile-device visitors to see the same home-page as everyone else - then you need to use another approach.

• Displaying all the posts in reverse order

• Choosing one post to be a welcome message, and always giving it the latest post-date

• Displaying a gadget at the top of your posts area, and only showing it on the home page.

Advantages and Disadvantages of each option

Option	Advantages	Disadvantages
Static page and custom re-direct	No template editing is needed Easy page editing - no messing around putting content into a gadget No gaps on other pages due to the gadget being "missing" Simple, elegant, and fully functional for desktop-based visitors.	Google probably didn't intend to give us this option when they set up custom re-directs, so it's possible that they might remove it again.   (It's such a nice solution, though, that I think it's worth the risk for now) Doesn't work for mobile device users if your blog has a mobile template enabled.
Show all posts in reverse order	Great for new readers - they can "follow the story".	Return visitors have to navigate down to where they were up to last time:  the blog has no way of helping them to remember where that was. You can't use most of Blogger's date features:  newer and older posts links will take the reader in the "wrong" direction.  And you have to manually enter any dates that would be relevant. Your posts will get "older" as you write more:  this may confuse search-engines, and there's a risk that google might to things to "very old" posts in the future.
Make one post always show up first	You can still use all of Google's date features. Readers will know when you actually posted to your blog. Great for returning readers:  they can see your (current) welcome comments, and then go straight to the latest post after that.	You have to remember to edit the "chosen" post every single time that you make a new post - one day, you might forget. This approach probably won't work on multi-author blogs:  there's a very high chance that someone would forget to edit the chosen post and change its date.
Show a "welcome gadget" on the home page only	Doesn't need any changes to Post date-time settings. Your blog still functions like a blog (older/newer post links , archive gadget etc). An HTML/Javascript gadget can be very flexible, and you can get Blogger to write all the HTML for you - see Making a Gadget Like a Post. You can use things other than text, eg a picture or even a poll. It includes an extreme option:  you could show no posts on the "home" page, and just show the gadget.	You need to edit your HTML template to make this work. You need to re-do the template customisation every time that you change templates. The welcome gadget isn't one of your posts: it's not included in exports of your blog contents (It is in an export of your template - but I don't think that the words inside it are included). A gadget cannot show quite as many things as a post.   Doesn't work for mobile device users if your blog has a mobile template enabled.

Can you think of other ways?   Please leave a comment below.

Setting the homepage's post date into the future doesn't work

Some people suggest that you can set the post-date of your main page in the future - and at some times  this has worked.

But now that scheduled posting is working the way most people expect it to (ie if you write a post today, and publish it with tomorrow's date, then it is shown to your readers from tomorrow onwards), this will not work - because your "home page" won't show until that future date is reached.

There may be some ways you can fudge it in to working (eg post the page with a date in the past, and then post it again with a future date).   But I VERY STRONGLY don't recommend this:  even if they work today, they may stop working at some time in the future when Google make a change to how future-dated posts are handled.

---

Related Articles:

Displaying a gadget only on the home page

Showing your oldest post first in Blogger (AKA Showing your posts in reverse order)

Making one post always come up first

Changing the date for a post.

Stopping certain pages from ever appearing on the home page

How to put put Posts into your Pages in Blogger

This article shows how to set up your blog, using Blogger, so that it looks like your posts are on separate web-pages.

Can you put Posts onto Pages in Blogger?

Ever since Google introduced "pages" into Blogger, people have complained that their posts all go onto the "home page", and asked how to put posts onto different pages in their blog.

The standard, but unsatisfactory, answer is

"Sorry, that's not how Blogger works.   So called "static" pages in Blogger are meant to be used for reference information that doesn't change often, which you don't want to be part of your regular post-feed, but which you do want users to have easy access to."

Basically, this is part of the difference between post and pages.

Luckily it's easy to set up your blog so that it looks like your posts are on different pages [tweet this]    (even though you and I know that this isn't how Blogger works) by following three simple steps.

Follow these steps to put your posts into pages

1   Add Categories

Categorise your posts by adding Labels to them.

It's your choice whether to add Labels to all posts, or just the ones that you want to show up on specific "pages".

2 Make a "pages look alike" menu bar:

There are (at least) are three ways of doing this - described below.

When Blogger first implemented static pages that could link to websites, I suggested choosing which ever option suited your blog best.   However now, due to the increasing importance of mobile templates, I recommend Option c), because the pages-gadget is the only one mentioned which automatically shows upon mobile-templates.

a)   With a Labels Gadget:    

Use the usual add-a-gadget approach to put a Labels gadget into the spot where you would put the Pages gadget if you wanted to make a horizontal menu bar with it.

If your blog has some Labels that you don't want to have "pages" for, then set it to show only some of your Labels:

b)  With a Linked-list gadget:

Use the usual add-a-gadget approach to put a Link-list gadget where you would put the Pages gadget if you wanted to make a horizontal menu bar with it.
Add a link to the list for each Label that you want a "page" for.   The HTML to use for each Label value is

http://YOUR-BLOG-URL/search/label/THE-LABEL-NAME

You can also add other items (eg individual Posts, or even Bllogger's static "pages" if you really must have them - see why I don't like them!) - see the menu bar at the top of this site for an example of this. 

c)   With a Pages gadget:   

Use the usual add-a-gadget approach to put a Pages gadget into the menu bar area.   (You can do this even if you have not created any Pages of content).

While you are editing the Pages gadget, there is an  + Add link page option.  

Click on this, and add an entry in like the ones described above in he Linked-list gadget option, putting

•  the text you want in your menu bar into the Page title field 
• The label search command into the Web address field.

3   Optional:  Deal with the home-page

If you don't want your posts to appear on the "home page" was well as the topic pages, then there are two possibilities:

• Use a technique similar to Showing a Gadget only on the Home Page  to not show the Blog Posts gadget on the home page. 
  
  In this case, the condition to use is !=  instead of ==)  
  
  If you do try this, then I strongly recommend that you consider the various options for giving your blog a home page, and make sure you accept the disadvantages of editing your template.

OR

• Give your blog a "home page" using the custom-redirect option discussed in this post.

However I generally see this as unnecessary, because in most cases, very blog visitors ever see the home page.

Job Done

It really is that simple.  Your readers can now click on the "pages" in your blog from a "menu" at the top, and see a list of posts for the Page that they chose.

Even better, if some posts relate to more than one topic, they show up on both of the relevant pages.    And if you have used the Pages gadget, your blog is well set-up to work with a mobile-template - which is something that is getting more important every month.

Don't forget to test your blog, to make sure that the menu bar is working how you expect it to and that it looks OK, in all the browsers that your readers are actually using.

---

Related Articles:

Using Labels to group your Blogger Posts

Adding external and internal URLs to your pages-gadget / menu bar

Giving your blog a home page

The difference between posts and pages

Showing a Gadget only on the Home Page

Making your blog work for people using smartphones and tablets

How to make a blog into a real website

This article explains how you can use Blogger to make a site that looks just like any other website and why you might, sometimes, want to do this.

Blogs vs Websites

Some people are very happy to use Blogger to make a blog, that is, website that looks like a diary or journal that they write in regularly.

But a common question is "how to I make my blog into a real website, just like "someone" has done over at "this website"?

This isn't easy to answer:  Not everyone means the same thing when they say "real website".  "Someone" might have just changed the background image, installed a third-party template, changed a few settings - or re-written the entire Blogger template!  They may have just made the blog look more professional than the basic templates do - or maybe they've removing all "blog" features so that the site is like a regular brochure website.

The bottom-line is that, even with no changes a blog is a "real website", because it's got:

• An url (www.your-blog-name.blogspot.com)
• A space on the internet that's dedicated just to it. (For Blogger users, that space is inside Google's servers - we don't have to pay for our own hosting).
• Web-pages, made in HTML, which visitors can look at using a web-browser (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc)

And there are some sites which are not at all ashamed to look like blogs, for example:

• www.IkeaHackers.net/ - a site for sharing clever ways of repurposing kitset furniture
• www.DarkRoastedBlend.com - a site about coffee - notice their About page is really just a post from 2005!
• www.HowAboutOrange.blogspot.com - a very stylish crafts website
• www.RUStling.org - a site listing all the songs in a large folk-song book
• www.TableQuizHelper.com - a site providing templates etc pub quiz-organizers
• http://www.trendmatcher.nl/ - a Dutch-language site about technology trends.

This article from Blogger Buster lists a 100 others - and I'm sure that there are plenty of popular non-English language sites that look like blogs, too.

But there are many other sites that have had some or all of their Blogger features hidden, for example

• www.GalwayTransport.info - a local public transport information site
• www.ConcentricsRestaurants.com/ - a promotional site for a company that builds restaurants
• www.RenewPilates.com - the site for a Pilates studio

You need to do more work to make the second type of site - and even then, if a knowledgeable visitor looks at the source-code for a page, they can still tell that you're using Blogger.   So, usually, I'd recommend that you focus on what you want to achieve with the site, rather than "getting rid of blogger".

That said, here is a lit of things that you may want to to do to "turn your blog into a website".   They are in, roughly, the order that I recommend doing them to have the maximum effect.

Initial steps to reduce the "bloggy" feeling

1)   Get a custom domain

This is a website address like  www.mySite.com  or  www.yourBlog.org - or whatever available name that you choose.

Using a custom domain means that your address will not have "blogspot.com" in it.

You can do this either:

• Using Blogger's  Settings > Basic > Blog Address > Add a Custom Domain function, or 
• By using an URL that you buy directly from a domain registrar - you might need to do this if the address you want isn't available through the Blogger function (eg I recently needed a co.nz address for a site) or if you do not have a credit card.

This step is essential if you don't want the site to be perceived as blog, because the address is what people see when they first find the site in search-engine results.

If you are going to get a custom-domain, then I strongly recommend doing it at the very beginning of setting up your blog, so all the later steps are based on the custom-domain name rather than re-directions.  This is is A Good Thing for SEO - and even if SEO doesn't matter for your blog initially it may become important later on.


2)    Turn off the navBar, and remove the space where it used to be


3)   Show only 1 post on the main page.


4)   Hide the "blog-specific" values from posts, on the Layout > Blog post (edit) tab.  

At a minimum the things to turn off are:

• Post-date
• Posted-by
• Post-time
• Comments
• Links to this post
• Labels
• Reactions
• Email post links
• Post sharing

5)    Make a home page - ideally using the custom-redirect option


6)    Remove the attribution gadget (the bit where it says "Powered by Blogger")


7)    Remove the "subscribe to posts (atom)" link


8)    Add an RSS-subscription gadget using Feedburner.
Some people say this is optional - but I believe that all "proper" websites offer an RSS feed and show that they do so by using a feedburner-style RSS chiclet.   If you just add Blogger's Subscribe gadget instead, it gives the Atom - ie blog-style feed.

Banishing the Blogger look for good

These next steps really go together: if you do one, you need to do the others too. They are needed if you totally want to remove the blog-ish-ness:


9)     Remove all gadgets that show a list of posts. These include the Archive, Labels.  This is simply the reverse of the add-a-gadget procedure - edit the existing gadget, and click Remove.


10)   Remove the "older posts / home / newer posts" links.

11)   Set up your own navigation system: every post or page needs to be able to be accessed from either a button or a link that is in either a gadget or another post/page.

It's temping to think about navigation from the home page. But first-time visitors who come to your site from search-results will not arrive at the home page. They might not even think to look at the home page. Ideally your navigation system should offer several routes to get to every piece of information, and should include both logical links between posts and a search-based option.

Tools that you might use to help with this:

• Summary posts, with links to detail pages about the topic. (Eg my public-transport site has a "city buses details" page, which links to individual route maps)
• A menu bar with links to the most-important summary posts.
  NB  If you use the Pages gadget for this, it is automatically included if you give the site a mobile template which is an important step if you want the site to be responsive.
• Linked-List gadgets to show summary posts, or lists of related detail posts, in the sidebar or footer.

An alternative to your own navigation system is to use categories to put your posts into pages. This doesn't fully reduce the bloggy feeling, since someone who looks at a page sees a list of posts (with just post-summaries if you've used jump-links).   However changing the the status message (the grey box that says "showing all posts with label whatever") can make this acceptable in some sites (ie ones where the line between blog and website is blurred).

What you (currently) cannot do

You cannot remove the post-date values from the URL of blog posts.
If your entire site could be done with 20 or fewer screens, you could use Pages for everything - but IMHO this isn't necessary, visitors don't seem to be overly spooked by URLs with numbers in them.

You cannot use a dynamic template 
If you want your site to look like a website, not a blog: you need to use a Designer, or possibly a Layout, template.

Other things that you might do

You might want your blog tostand out in the seach results in order to get more visitors - see Getting Started with SEO.

You might want to link it to the social networks - remember that there are wide range of possible links, and you need a strategy about how the site relates to each social medium that you use.

Have I missed anything?

I wrote this article  while I was setting up a site on which I want to minimise the "blog" look-and-feel, and I've tried to capture all the steps that I did.  

But maybe I've missed some things?   Maybe there are features that work differently on other templates.

What else would you do?

What bloggers need to know about Responsive Web Design

This article is about responsive web design, and what it means for Blogger users.

Some of the information is relevant for people who use other platforms (especially Wordpress) but much isn't, because Blogger does so much of this for us.

What is Responsive Web Design?

One of the biggest changes to how people use the internet recently is the range of screen sizes.

Back in the day, we had ever-increasing screen resolutions, so most people went from 800x600 to 1024x768, etc - the specific varied along with the type of monitor and graphics card.  But the constant was the annual joke about "What's your New Year's resolution?" - the answer always got larger each year.

But now there are smartphones, tablets, and giant TV screens in the mix. Users may be looking at websites in anything between 300x200 to 4096 � 2160 - or more if they're using a TV.

To start with, no one was quite sure how websites should cater for this. Many people made two sites: one for their "regular sized" users and one for "mini-screen" users. Sometimes this led to  duplicate-content, which didn't amuse Google's search-engines. It made more work (of the boring kind) for people maintaining websites, who had to update two places. And it didn't cater for the super-size-screen folks at all.

After much thought, in June 2012, Google announced that a technique called "responsive web design" was their recommended approach. Basically, it says to have one version of the website, but to put instructions into it (usually with CSS) saying whether or where to show things based on the size of the user's screen - ie, effectively by "responding" to the user's settings.

This article from Blacknight Solutions goes into a lot more detail - and uses more technically precise language to describe the challenges and the approach.

What does Responsive Design mean for Blogger users?

This infographic is a quick-and-visual summary of the area of responsive-website design.

It recommends various books and in the "toolkit" section, it lists options for Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla and JQuery.

Of these, JQuery is used for display tools that a number of Blogger-helpers provide - so I would expect to see "responsive" being added to their features soon. 

Apart from the JQuery front, initially I thought that responsive website design didn't matter for people who use Blogger: as Ive explained before, we simply don't have much control over the web-pages that are made to display our blogs. But it made me wonder about how Google might change Blogger so they were following these guidelines fully themselves.

But after thinking some more, I realised that Blogger is already starting to use the responsive design approach with mobile templates: if one is enabled for your blog, then the gadgets that are shown a different on mobile and non-mobile devices ane the way that posts are displayed is different - but the underlying site content (posts and pages) is the same.

And there are things that we can do in our posting and template editing that will help Blogger make our sites work better on devices with different screen sizes.

So, what should we do?

Set the maximum width for pictures.

In the post-editor, you can choose to make pictures small, medium, large, etc - and the values that are used for this are absolute numbers of pixels height and width.

But what happens if you set the width to, say 400 pixels ("400px"), and a user has a screen which is narrower than this?  The question is hard to answer, because mobile devices apply some scaling-down so that in many situations the picture fits, and look fine.

I recently read an article from an English coffee-drinker, showing how to change these sizes to any values you want and to control the picture quality at the same time.   At first I thought that this would solve the problem.

But there are cases where it won't work properly, eg if you want text and pictures to be side by side, and use a table rather than a "<div>" statement to do this. If the amount of space that you allocate to the picture is wider than the space on the screen, then the results my be unpredictable, or the text may be very, very narrow.

I was originally going to suggest working around this problem by specify the width in terms of percentages instead of pixels, for example:   style = 'width: 80%;'  But, as I found tonight, if you float your pictures to the left or the right, that approach doesn't quite work - the way that the post-editor puts in <div> statements means that scaled down pictures can be left inside empty larger empty divisions, etc..

A better alternative is to continue to use small / medium / large etc, and also to add a CSS rule  saying that pictures can take more than a certain proportion (ie percentage) of the available. space.    (Thanks to Paul of Spice Up Your Blog who suggested this, as a way to stop pictures from spilling into the sidebar).  

Luckily it's very easy to do this - just add a CSS rule in the usual way for your template.   The specfic rule to add is

.post img {max-width:98% !important}

When you copy and paste - don't forget the dot (.) at the start of that line.

Also, you may like to experiment with values - you might even go as low as 80% on some blogs.   The beauty of this rule is that it specifies the maximum - if your photo is smaller than that, it's not affected.

Width of other embedded elements, eg PDF files

Pictures aren't the only things that have a fixed width - the same thing can happen to embeddded documents / PDF files, slideshows, maps, forms, etc. They can be more challenging to use on sites with smaller screen sizes. Somteimes their code might cater for differnt sizes. But one good overall principle is simply to remove the height statement from the, and specify the width in terms of a percentage.

That said, I don't do this for the embedded Google custom maps on one of my sites: as a user I very much prefer to see the map at full size, and to scroll around as I need to - so I've assumed that my visitors prefer the same approach.   It all depends on the nature of your site, and how people use it.

Responsive AdSense ads

If you use Adsense via Blogger's gadgets, then appropriately sized units will be placed on your blog. And (unless you choose the "ads between posts" option in the Blog Posts gadget) - this includes inside mobile-template viewers.

But many Bloggers use AdSense by getting the code and installing it to their template or putting it into an HTML/Javascript gadget, perhaps because they want better control over the ad colour-scheme, or to have the option of image-only AdSense ads.

Fortunately it's pretty easy to adapt these ads to be responsive - this excellent article from Digital Inspiration explains this technique in more detail.

Sidenote: I was quite amused with recent announcements by some Blogger-helpers (eg Paul in Spice Up Your Blog) that we can now use AdSense in Dynamic Templates.  As far as i know this has been the case since Dynamic Templates were introduced: provided AdSense is enabled in your blog with a gadget (not embedded in posts, or put into HTM/Javascript gadgets), then the Dynamic Template view promised to show an advertisement in an appropriate place (most likely the footer, I think). In princple, this is just another dimension of being "responsive" to different screens and ways of reading website content.

What else

My instinct is that there are other things which blogger users will need to think about as we move into a "responsive" world - at least Bloggers who care about visitors from different screen sizes will need to be busy.

At a minimum, consider whether you need to enable a mobile template for your blog, and set up some specific gadgets just for it.


What else do you think is relevant here?

---

Related Articles

Who Blogger converts out posts into web-pages

Giving your blog a special template that only mobile users see

Showing Google maps inside your blog

Getting image-only AdSense ads

Putting 3rd party HTML into your blog

How to add a gadget using Blogger

Adding a CSS rule to your template