"I don’t see much sense in that," said Rabbit.
"No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn’t.
But there was going to be when I began it.
It’s just that something happened to it along the way."

Revision 1:

Change Log

[March 30, 2004]

1. Added a section called Rediffblog Issues.
2. Added a tip on how to temporarily disable your blog.
3. Updated section on tagboards.
4. Updated section on image hosting websites.
5. Added a link to my sample templates.

1. Introduction

Welcome to my guide to rediffblogs. If you’ve come here, you are either a co-blogger or a wannabe. This page contains everything you need to make your blog the way you want it to be.

1.1. Audience

I understand that most bloggers aren’t computer people and so this guide starts off with the very basics and then moves on to the more advanced stuff.

1.2. Feedback

A feedback mechanism forms the most important part of any work. Your feedback will help improve this guide and you might find yourself mentioned in the credits part of this document. Comments/suggestions/flames are always welcome at pravin[at]gmail[dot]com. Alternately, you can use the comments section at the bottom of this page.

1.3. Official Homepage

The official version of this document can be found at http://pravin.insanitybegins.com/tutorials/rediffblog-guide/. Check here for the latest changes and revisions to this document.

1.4. Mirroring, Copyright and Distribution

This document titled "Dee’s Guide to Rediffblogs" is copyright ©, 2003-2006.

You are free to mirror and distribute this document in any form so long at its contents are not altered and it is presented in its entirety with this copyright notice intact.

2. Rediffblog basics

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of blogging, I suggest you check my blog.

Lets take a look at some of the page elements.

1. Posts - Clicking on this shows you your posts.
2. Settings - This takes you to a page where you can modify stuff like your Page Title, Description, Favorite sites and your Time Zone.
3. Template - This is where you can modify your template.
4. Category - This is where you can specify the category of your post. A good trick is to use this only for special posts like About Me or My Favorite Things and leave it blank for all your other posts.
   You can do this by writing a post with stuff about yourself and then specifying its category as "About Me". This will show up on the links under category. An easy way to add sections to your site.

TIP: Every time you change your settings or Template, be sure to click on Publish Blog to execute those changes.

3. An HTML Primer

3.1 Changing text attributes

Note: #FF0000 specifies the color in a hexadecimal triplet of (red, green, blue). You can also use color names like blue, cyan, lime, fuchsia, yellow, red, maroon, white, silver, gray and black. i.e. <font color="blue">Rivers and valleys</font> = Rivers and valleys

3.2 Centering, right aligning and justifying text

3.3 Linking friends

3.3.1 Basics of linking – the anchor <a> tag

Linking to a friend’s blog or another website is done by using the anchor tag. The anchor tag looks like:

<a href="http://dee.rediffblogs.com">Visit Dee</a>

Replace http://dustyant.com with the address of the website and Visit Dee with the text you’d like to display.

3.3.2 Using an automated tool like Blogrolling

4. Adding images

Adding images is done by the <IMG> tag which looks like:

<IMG SRC="marsh.jpg">

The above code will cause the browser to display the image located at marsh.jpg.

4.1 Hosting your images

You cannot host your images at rediff. What this means is that if you’ve got a picture on your hard disk that you’d like to put up on your blog, you’ll have to first host that image on another website.

Here are some sites which let you do just that

1. http://www.ripway.com
2. http://www.photobucket.com
3. http://www.villagephotos.com

After signing up, look for a link that says upload and follow the instructions there. Once you’ve uploaded your picture, you get a link. Use this link instead of marsh.jpg in the image tag above.

4.2 Here’s a trick – for users with a knowledge of HTML only

Most free web space providers like geocities and tripod do not permit direct links to images. So what you can do is use the <iframe> tag and embed a page.

In other words, you will enter something like

<iframe src="http://in.geocities.com/oh_its_dee/page.html" width="100" height="100" scrollbars=no>

where you want the image to appear. And page.html will contain:

<html>
<body margin=0>
<img src="image.jpg">
</body>
</html>

Notice the margin=0 attribute. And Voila! Does that box look ugly to you? You can make it look prettier by setting the frame width to 0.

5. Adding a tag board

5.1 What is a tag board?

A tag board is a great way of adding interactivity to your blog. A tag board makes it easier for people to leave comments on your blog. A tag board looks something like this:

5.2 That’s cool! How do I get one?

Getting your own taggy involves two steps:

1. Signing up with a tag board provider like
   1. Tagboard
   2. Shoutbox
   3. Doodleboard
   4. Who-Is-Online Taggy
   Once this is done, you receive a piece of html code.
2. Next you got to insert that code into your template.

6. A look at templates

Rediff provides you with six templates to choose from. A template defines how your blog will look. You can customize the templates that come with rediffblogs. All it involves is customizing the stylesheet located at the top of the page. If you are lost, just follow the step by step tutorial.

6.1 Customizing rediffblogs templates

I’ll show you how you can customize the first template.

Customizing others is very similar

1. Log into rediffblogs and click on Template.
2. In the text area that appears, scroll down till you see <style>. You can search for this using the find command (Ctrl+F).
3. Look for the line .righttext {FONT-SIZE: 8pt; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: arial; TEXT-DECORATION: none}
4. Changing the values of FONT-SIZE, COLOR, FONT-FAMILY will change the look of the text in the yellow area. Lets change theFONT-FAMILY to verdana,
   .righttext {FONT-SIZE: 8pt; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY:verdana; TEXT-DECORATION: none}
5. If you save the template and view your blog, you’ll see that the text in the yellow area appears in the verdana font.
6. A well designed template has it’s customizable elements well separated from its body. In this case, however, some of the elements are located deep within the body. If you move down to the body tag <body you’ll find that it contains, among others, the following attributes:
   • bgcolor - This specifies the background color of the page. To change it to, say yellow, change this to bgcolor="yellow".
   • text - This specifies the color of the text in the page. To change this to a shade of black, change this to text="#333333".
   • link - This specifies the color of the links. To change the color of all links to red, change this to link="red".
   • alink - This specifies the color of the active link (i.e. the color the link changes to, when you click it).
   • vlink - This specifies the color of the links you’ve already visited.

7. Creating your own template

This is a bit advanced. I am going to assume the reader to be familiar with HTML. Creating your own template involves:

1. Creating the page layout.
2. Adding rediff-specific tags so that the rediff-cgi can replace them with content.

7.2 Rediff Specific Tags

Lets take a look at all the tags you can use:

7.3 Sample Templates

Guess what I’ve got for you fine folks? A bunch of sample templates that you can use for your blog! Visit http://themes.rediffblogs.com.

8. Fancy Tricks

8.1 Getting rid of Rediff Ads

Before continuing, I’d like you to ponder for a while. Rediff provides blogging as a free service and the ads you see on your page contribute to the hosting/bandwidth/storage costs of your blog. If you’d still like to remove those ads, read ahead.

Getting rid of ads means removing the following texts:

1. <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript"><!--
   var a='http://ads.rediff.com/RealMedia/ads/';
   var RN = new String (Math.random());
   var RNS = RN.substring (2, 11);
   function da(width, height, posn) {
   var p='www.rediff.com/blogs-general.htm/1' + RNS + '@' + posn;
   if(v < 11) {
   document.write('<A HREF=' + a + 'click_nx.ads/' + p + '>
   
   	<IMG SRC=' + a + 'adstream_nx.ads/' + p + ' BORDER=0
   	WIDTH=' + width + ' HEIGHT= ' + height + ' VSPACE=0 HSPACE=0><\/A>');
   } else {
   document.write('<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript1.1 SRC=' + a +
   	'adstream_jx.ads/' + p + '><\/SCRIPT>');
   }
   }
   //-->
   </SCRIPT>

2. <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" TYPE="text/javascript">
   
   <!--
   if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") != -1)
   {
   document.write("<IFRAME SRC=\"http://blogs.rediff.com/blogs-all-Top.htm\"
   	NAME=Top WIDTH=\"468\" HEIGHT=\"60\" MARGINWIDTH=\"0\"
   	MARGINHEIGHT=\"0\" FRAMEBORDER=\"0\" SCROLLING=\"no\"><\/IFRAME><BR>");
   }
   else
   {
   da(180, 150, 'Top');
   document.write("<BR>");
   }
   //-->
   
   </SCRIPT>

3. <noscript>
   <BR>
   <a href="http://ads.rediff.com/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.ads/
   	www.rediff.com/blogs-general.htm@Top">
   	<img src="http://ads.rediff.com/RealMedia/ads/
   	adstream_nx.ads/www.rediff.com/blogs-general.htm@Top"
   	border="0"></a>
   
   </noscript>

Now you have an ad-free page!

However, you can see the rectangle with the rediff.com logo. To remove that, remove everything within the <table></table> (including <table></table>) tag immediately enclosing the word redifflogo.gif. In template 1, it’s everything within the first occurrence of <table> </table> tag.

8.2 Temporarily disabling your blog to visitors

If you would like to temporarily disable your blog and prevent visitors from viewing your posts,

1. Look for the <rediffBlog> </rediffBlog> tags
2. Add <!– after the <rediffBlog> and –> before the </rediffBlog> tag. Your template code should look something like this:

...
<rediffBlog>
<!--
    ...
-->
</rediffBlog>
...

9. Rediff Issues

9.1 Posting to your blog

While posting a new post to your blog, rediff-cgi removes the spaces between two tags if they follow each other:

Ex. If you are posting the following text
<span class="bingo">Hello</span> <span class="doodle">World</span>

Note that there is a space between </span> and <span>. Rediff-cgi will remove that space and store the post as
<span class="bingo">Hello</span><span class="doodle">World</span>

This will change your desired output from Hello World to HelloWorld (without spaces).