I learned HTML and CSS by taking webpages apart and then trying to put them back together. “Oops, I guess that code was important” was a common utterance. :)

Javascript was too much for me though. I’m not a designer, just a hobbyist, and there seemed to be no reason to work so hard on a webpage.

But today I realized I really, really wanted a three-column layout for this blog. I really like the template design, though, and it even came “out of the box” in a color scheme that pleased me. I didn’t want to have to start over. I wanted to just add a column.

Easier wanted than done. But I did it! All by myself, even. Usually when I have computer trouble of any kind, I’ll e-tap an online friend who’s a whiz with this stuff and cry on his shoulder. Then he tells me how to fix it and everyone is happy. But today I wad determined to puzzle out the arcane coding myself and get that column in.

The end result isn’t as polished as what I started with, naturally, but I am happy with it for now. After some more practice I’ll make it sparkle.

Sheta is participating in Entrecard, and had made up some nifty badges – the “Dare to be Different” one – so I decided to join the fun. It’s free and easy to sign up, and you get exposed to a lot of neat blogs, as well as getting exposure for your own.

Blogged.com is a rating site. My personal blog merited an 8.3, Great, and I’d really like to see this one inch higher than a 6.4. So do me a solid and vote there, ‘kay?

I also signed up for Feedburner, along with their email-update service. That’s another cool, free webtool. Who doesn’t like free? Not only will they “burn” your blog feed, they make it easy to make sure the webcrawlers find it and keep it current. They also provided the active headline generator over in the right sidebar. Tech toys are so much fun. :)

As I sign up at more places, there will be more buttons, badges, widgets and updates.

Vin’s method creates a “read more” link that opens the post’s individual page in a new window or tab.

It’s quick and easy to do; one piece of code goes into the blog template, the other into the post template.

There are additional tweaks and twitters for link color, size, wording, and so on. Definitely worth checking out if you have a lot of long posts.

But since I don’t, I quickly found the “read more” link annoying on my short posts where there is nothing more to read than what has appeared on the main page.

Gaby calls these cuts “expandable post zones,” and that’s a good term for it: one click to expand the text, and another collapses it back into the Internet aether.

The best part is that it doesn’t add an unnecessary link when there is no text to reveal. That is just awesomeage.

To be fair, though, Gaby’s post isn’t as newbie-friendly as Vin’s. For example, my template doesn’t include the ” ” tag; so when I followed the instructions as written, the code didn’t work. I had to go back into the template and add the tag myself. Not a big deal, but for anyone unfamiliar with hand-coding, this omission might make them pass on this otherwise excellent tweak.