Colour it beautiful

Your Blogger blog, that is.

Duh, I hear you say. That's what templates are for!

Well, yes... but haven't you noticed how modest Blogger's choice of colour combinations is, at least for some of its features?

The blog description subtitle (in another blog), for example, was very frustrating to me for a while, because I wanted it to be a different colour from those offered by its standard scheme for the layout I was editing. (In other words, the combination for my chosen layout didn't have the colour I was looking for.)

No problem, I thought: I'll find the HEX code of the colour I had in mind elsewhere (there are lots of places where you can find those codes; here's a chart I found useful) and then simply copy and paste it in the box next to the colour (on the layout "fonts and colours" editing page, of course), thus replacing the existing HEX code.

And so I did.
Copy and paste it, that is.
I did NOT replace the existing colour because my little manoeuvre, for some reason, simply didn't work. After I had entered the desired HEX code and pressed SAVE CHANGES (I bet you thought I had forgotten to "save", eh? ;-), there was a message confirming the change had been saved - only, it was nowhere to be seen. The colour of the blog description subtitle was exactly the same as before.

I repeated this process a few more times, cursing Firefox and/or Blogger all the way, all to no avail.

Then, instead of clicking on the "Fonts and colours" tab, as usually (after all, it makes sense, right?), I clicked on the "edit template HTML" tab.

Then, in the maze of HTML tags, I simply looked for the term "blog description".
I found it soon enough: it is the sixth row under the heading VARIABLE NAME.

Just as an illustration, it looks like this:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Variable name="descriptioncolor" description="Blog Description Color"
type="color" default="#999" value="#E41B17"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(The emphasis in red is mine, for the sake of clarity.
And the codes you see above are, obviously, the ones used in that particular blog.
The tags in your blog would contain the codes of the colours you used in your blog.)

Then, within the tag, I looked for "value" - you'll find it at the end of the tag (here highlighted in red) - and replaced the existing HEX code with the code of the colour I wanted.

This time, it worked like a charm.

I know: how could it not?
Well, experience has taught me that, within Blogger, logic doesn't always apply as flawlessly as one would expect...
Still, it worked.

I hope it works for you, too.

And remember: don't be intimidated by HTML.
(You'd be surprised to find out how many people are!)