In the past, I have dared to go in and play around with the sidebar (right side) contents. I have been getting tired of the crayon header and the solid light blue background color, so today I delved into learning how to make some changes. It will probably look a bit odd until I get all the changes finished. You too might like to do this, so I am going to explain how to change your background in this post.

How to change your main background:

The part that will be changed is the main background, not the text area background. I will give the text area background instructions in another entry. Go to your blog's control panel and select 'Edit Template' from the menu on the left. You will see a your blogs html code. Very near the begining of this code you will see a section that starts out with "body {". This is the section you will be working with to change your background.

Scan down the section starting with 'body' for the word 'background'. In my original template the word 'background' was followed by "-color:" and a code number for blue. You could change the color code to give your background a different color or you could use a jpeg of a texture that can be tiled.

To change to a new color:

You will need to know the hex number of the new color that you want to have. To find out you could go to http://www.december.com/html/spec/color.html. It gives samples of all the colors and the code numbers that correspond to them. Just jot down the code number you want and replace the original code with it. If you changed the color, skip the next paragraph.

To change to a tiled picture or texture:

You will need to select what jpeg you will want to tile in your background. To find some just do a websearch for 'textures' or pick out any jpeg from your hard drive or the net. Your page will load faster if you select a smaller picture. I looked for textures that were no larger than about 300X300 pixels. Upload your selected jpeg to your image host website. I like http://www.imageshack.us/ and http://www.flickr.com . Once you upload look for the url of the image. It will be the link starting with http. Copy that link using your mouse right click action. Now you will modify the html code in your template. remember that line I told you about that started with the word background. This is the line you will be changing. You will change it to:

background: url(paste the url you copied into these parentheses);

Now, select 'Preview' at the bottom of the window where your template editor is. It will open a new window where you can check to see that everything worked. Once you have examined it, you will go back to your template editor and either hit 'Save' to make your changes permanent or go back in and play around some more. If you feel that you have really messed up. Just close the Control Panel window without hitting save and your previous template will stay undisturbed.

Happy background changing. I will be playing around with mine as I design my new banner picture. The crayons have got to go. I will post how I made and changed my banner once I am done.