Thursday, July 5, 2012

How to fix blue links on your blog in Blogger

A few weeks ago we were having problems with our arangostudio blog in spanish. From one moment to the next, we ended up with very ugly and very blue links that were underlined! Our blog now looked like the original web pages back in the day. 

After several attempts to fix this issue using the design and layout templates, we were still having the same problem. Until eventually we figured out that our problem was Microsoft Word! We were editing our copy in Word and then cutting and pasting it into our blog. Apparently, this process was adding additional code that was overriding our settings.


If you are having this problem as well, here is what you need to do:

"Scroll down through the blog and see if you can pinpoint where the change happened. If all the posts look fine after a certain point (ie: older posts are OK) then the one with the colour change is the one that is causing the problem - and this one will affect all the new posts written after it.

Go to Edit Posts, then tick the box beside the suspect post and click on Edit. This brings the post back up onscreen. Click on the Edit Html tab (right next to the Compose tab). This lets you see all your code.

To find out if this particular post has the fault, click CTRL + F on your keyboard, which opens up a toolbar just above your bottom toolbar (at the bottom of your screen, just above the Start button).

You'll see a white box with Find: beside it. Type in a:link and hit Enter. If your post has the problem I had (ie: the colors kept defaulting to blue & purple, and overriding the color codes you typed in in Settings) the section will highlight for you (see below). This only works if you are already in the Edit Html view.

Right - you found it. Now what do you do? Take it all out. You'll find you have a ton of Word code in there. Click over to the Compose or Preview views to see how it looks, and whether you have deleted anything important. If you did, hit Edit Posts again and when prompted to Save or you'll lose your work, don't save it (because you DO want to lose it) then go back into Edit Post and have another go. If it's only one item (or typo) then right-click your mouse to Undo.

You'll find the Word stuff is very obvious - a whole chunk of code, and in there is the font: blue etc stuff. There will also be some code immediately after about underlining, which you also don't want. As per the link I gave you at the top of this post, your code will look something like this (notice the highlight:
a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline;
text-underline:single;}
and
a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-
decoration:underline; text-underline:single;}
Once you have got rid of all the code you don't want, hit the Save Now (blue button, on the right) which saves as a draft, then view the blog - all your link colors should have changed. If you are happy with everything, you can now go ahead and Publish Post, and your link colors will be back to what you want them to be."


The text above comes from Susie Jefferson's blog http://1stfloorflatcomputery.blogspot.com/2009/04/blogger-links-colour-problems.html

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