Hi,
Succeeded in uploading my template to blogger but when I pressed “save” it warned me that all widgets will be gone forever. Can I still have a subscribe and followers widget? (To be honest don’t even know what a widget exactly is.) If so, how? Thanks
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Nina,
First; widgets are those little add-ons that blogger has, which you usually place in the sidebar of the blog. They are controlled by blogger.
Now, to answer your other question: The problem is that there are widgets in the original template that you chose on Blogger that don’t have a home in Freeway’s template code. A great example is that “subscribe” widget that you mentioned. Because Freeway does not have an action for that widget, there is no place for it in the code that you pasted in.
There are several methods to work around it, but this is the easiest, assuming you have a sidebar for your widgets:
Double-click in your sidebar so you see an I-bar.
In the topbar, go to Insert/Action Item/Blogger Profile or Insert/Action Item/Blogger Posts (whichever one you don’t already have) and click on it. This will make it an inline element (flows like text).
Upload and add the template code to Blogger as you usually would. If it asks you, delete any widget you don’t have. You’ll add them back in step 4!
Go to the layout page in Blogger. You should see your “About Me” widget off to the side with an Add a Gadget box above it, like this image: (As you can see, I’ve already added a HTML widget through Blogger.)
Now, simply, add your gadgets back in! Next time you update the template code, tell Blogger to keep the widgets and they’ll go to the right place.
This worked because you added that first widget inline, and Blogger knows how to deal with that kind of element. All it does is add the new widgets to the text flow.
Note: If you want the widget to really look like a part of your website, then learn some HTML and CSS. You’ll never regret it, and wonder how you survived before. I learned though Codecademy.
How does that work for you?
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Caleb, thank you once again! I will try this step by step and report back. Since I am using freeway just to do my own little sites I am not sure whether I will ever learn html or CSS. Thank God for people like you though 
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Hi I am back. I guess I don’t have a side bar? My site looks like this: www.ninafecit.com. Can I still do this?
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Your regular pages don’t have a sidebar, but your blog page could!
I’m in the process of building an inline skeleton Blogger template (no styling, just the “bare bones”) which would probably help you a lot. You could add it to your website, and style it to match. I’ll have it done in a few hours and post the link here.
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The template is done, and I have named it Scribus (Latin for author).
There are two versions of it; Scribus and ScribusRPL. The first is built inline, and the second is built with layers and had the RLP action applied to it so it will grow with the content.
Inline is a more bulletproof construction method, but can be a little difficult to grasp and tweak. The RPL action basically takes a standard Freeway layout and attempts to make it inline automagically, which means there can be problems if you aren’t careful. At the same time, the RPL version is much easier to adjust to your needs.
Both have a inline sidebar to you can add widgets through Blogger’s online interface.
You can download Scribus here, and ScribusRPL here.
P.S. It’s probably just easier to follow my directions that I posted earlier than to try to adapt a template to your design, but whatever you find easier will work. Maybe you could open the RPL version of the template and just copy the sidebar over to your website in Freeway, just make sure that you have the RPL action applied to that page.
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Dear Caleb, I am overwhelmed by how nice and helpful you are. Thank you so much!!! If I press the above links though they just take me to the freeway talk homepage. Am I missing something?
Regarding the sidebar: You write: “Your regular pages don’t have a sidebar, but your blog page could!”
My goal is to have my blog look like a part of my website. so I want to keep my top navigation. Would I just add an additional side bar to my blog page, via navigation bar action? Or how would I do that? BTW I would be happy to pay you for all further information.
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Nina, sorry about the links, I must have forgotten the http:// part!
Once again, the links are here for the inline version, and here for the RPL version.
The sidebar can be completely separate from the navigation. You can see how I have mine set up at http://blog.calebgrove.com. The navigation is still at the top of the page, but I do have a sidebar which houses all the blog tools/info. This is a pretty standard blog layout, and is essentially what I’ve created in Scribus.
Could you upload the Freeway document somewhere and send the link to me?
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I shared it on dropbox hope that works
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Nina,
Yep, it worked! I’ve changed and saved the .freeway file. Take a look. This is what I did with it:
I didn’t try uploading it, so I can’t guarantee that it will work. Give it a try and let me know!
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CALEB, YOU ARE MY HERO! It works!!! I can’t thank you enough. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Now I will try to put in my widgets…
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Ok one more question: Can I change the widgets font color or even font? Also the widgets seem very far apart, how can I change that? I played around with edit and tried to change template default style but it didn’t do anything. I even looked at the code but couldn’t find anything which looked like a color number near the word widget. Guess I have to learn html after all …
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Nina,
I’ve tweaked the .freeway file in Dropbox. This is what I did this time:
Changed the spacing of the widgets to 25px (it was at 50px). To tweak this go to the “edit styles” dialog. You should see one named [class^=‘widget’]. Now, click on the “extended” button. You should see one line of data, select it and hit the edit button. Now, in the value field you can change the bottom-margin of all the widget items. (You’ll want to publish everything. To do this, click on the file menu, hold down the control key, and click publish everything.) Tweak it to taste.
Changed the default font of the widgets to unkempt. This is fairly easy. Once again, edit the [class^=‘widget’] style, and set the font to unkempt, or whatever you want to use. You didn’t have the unkempt code from Google Web Fonts on you blogger template page, so I added it. One note on this: Blogger doesn’t like the snippet as Google makes it. You have to add a / right before the > in the code.
To really customize the widgets you need to learn some CSS. I’ll never regret the time I spent learning code! It still amazes me with how powerful Freeway is once you know the fundamentals of how HTML and CSS work.
I learn hands-on, so Codecademy was a lifesaver! Their web fundamentals course is really awesome.
When developing Blogger templates, Firebug in Firefox is truly my best friend. I can select an element on the page, see what it’s class is, and play with the styling. When I’m happy with it, I create a new style in Freeway which targets said class.
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Oh, and as to the font color: Just add the color attribute to that [class^=’widget’] style.
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Again I can do nothing but thank you! When I tried to publish all, I got a message: "One or more html files which do not belong to this site will be overwritten. Is this of concern or just click ok? I also noticed that the blind text is gone from my blogger profile and archive…
Yet another question what is actually the difference between upload and publish site?
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I usually just click OK. It hasn’t bitten me yet!
I’m not sure what you mean by “blind text”. Could you elaborate?
Publishing places all the website files on your hard drive. Uploading copies those published files to your server.
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Yet another question what is actually the difference between upload and publish site?
Publish - will create all the necessary images/html files and place them in the Site folder on your Mac.
Upload - will Publish your pages (to your Site folder on your Mac) and then FTP the contents of your locally stored Site folder up to your Web server.
You can do a Publish without an Upload but you cant do an Upload without a Publish (it happens first)
David
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Thanks guys! I could have sworn that I did the upload without publishing first.
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Sorry for using “blind text” just translating from German I mean the fake text in the action boxes. The latin text.
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Ah. The fake text is something that Freeway generates when you publish the website. You have to publish it before the text will appear.
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