Time to learn a new Blogger trick!!
Although I rarely use the image gadget in Blogger, I recently had a client who ran into a very common problem that she needed help with. After helping her out, I decided that this topic would make a great beginner tutorial for all of you as well.
Plus ALSO (in my best Junie B. voice), I am way overdue on posting a new Blogger tutorial for all of you. Get ready to learn something new and super EASY!!
Title: How to Remove the Required Title from a Blogger Gadget
Level of Difficulty: Beginner/Easy
Time: Less than 2 minutes!
NO CODING REQUIRED! (this may or may not be a lie....)
Have you ever tried to add an image gadget to your sidebar without a title... only to get this annoying error in Blogger... requiring you to include a title (see visual below)?
Those of you not familiar with code or those of you that just don't want to mess with the blog template might have chosen to either add the stinkin' title to the image, or not add the image altogether.
You might have even gotten clever and uploaded the image to Photobucket, grabbed the HTML image code and uploaded an HTML/Javascript Gadget instead. Of course, this will force you to work with code, but it will get the job done.... with some time and effort.
Good for you for your quick thinking...but I have something even easier that will save you a great deal of time and effort, and won't require coding or an image hosting account.
There is only ONE step in this tutorial!!
The next time you want to upload an image to a Blogger image gadget WITHOUT being forced to add a title, simply, add the following text in the same place you would add the title text from within the gadget form... <!--> and click SAVE (see visual below).
When I am all done, I end up with an image and...
LOOK...
WARNING: It is about to get GEEKY up in here!!
What did we just do??
Well friends, we just tricked the gadget into "thinking" there was a title, but in reality, we sent a coded message to not show the title text!! I know, I know... I told you that there was no coding involved...I LIED!!! Technically, you did not have to open your blog template and add code or add CSS, but the text you added to the title is actually HTML...Hyper Text Markup Language... for those of you who fear the fact that you just used code!! ha!!
Here is what the text you just added really means...that is... if you want to get a little Geeky with me for fun.
I will attempt to break this down and explain this in the most basic way possible...
The angle brackets < > (also known as inequality signs) "house" messages (tags and content) we want to send in HTML. The text between the angle brackets is typically referred to as a TAG name. With HTML and CSS, we can communicate to web browsers and tell it how to display our content!! Pretty COOL stuff, huh??
Here is the breakdown of the HTML tag we typed as the title of our image gadget:
< "ET PHONE HOME"
The angle brackets open our communication with a web browser (just like dialing a number on a telephone) and let the web browser know what we want it to do or not do. When our code is written properly, the web browser determines how to display our content on the web based on the tags and content we communicated typed.
! "Here Ye, Here Ye!"
The exclamation point is typically followed by a declaration like, <!DOCTYPE html>, which tells the web browser what language we are using and how to display the content for that language.
I am really trying hard to make this as simple as possible to understand...
The text that follows a declaration will determine the content type to the web browser. Basically, the exclamation point tells the web browser to pay attention.
- "NOTHING, NADA, ZILTCH"
The two hyphen's we included told the web browser to display NOTHING as the title text.
I created a little visual to help make it easier for you to remember what to type inside the gadget title form entry when you do NOT want a title to appear.
Save it, Pin it, print it on a sticky note, or ignore it.... whatever will help you save time should you run into this problem in Blogger ever again.
I hope you all have enjoyed learning something new today!! Keep checking back periodically for more quick Blogger Tutorials!! Thank you for stopping by & I would love to read your comments below!!
