In my last post, which was kind of brief, I mentioned that I was trying something new. That was to see if I could create HTML pages and attach them to this blog in some fashion.

The immediate answer turns out to be yes. I don’t know why I’d never thought about it before, but just because one has a blog, what would have prevented me from uploading HTML pages? Nothing, it seems. After all, I’ve uploaded pictures and files before. That part was actually very easy, as I just added a pretty much nothing page with one line, and it worked just fine.

The next part wasn’t as easy, though. I thought about it, and wondered how easy it would be to make at least the header look like the blog header. The first thing I realized is that I couldn’t just look at the source code and get what I needed because much of what you need is coded into the CSS files, along with the PHP files.

But I’m not so dumb; where there’s a will, there’s a way. It took me about an hour, but I figured out how to get the image to do what I wanted it to do so at least that looked like the blog. Then it took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to get the blog name onto the image; that was just stupidity on my part, and that’s one of the problems with trying to do things really late in the evening, or early in the morning, since it was almost 1:30 at this point. I did get it on there, though, got the font correct also. What I can’t do, though, is get the spacing correct. So, it’ll look like the main page, but the name will jump if someone comes to the page. That may or may not be a minor issue for some people.

The next thing I wanted to try was to see if I could get my brief content to look like it does on the blog. I spent 25 minutes on that before I decided either I was too tired or there’s something I’m missing. When I got the font and color to look like it does on the blog, it also added this line in front of the content, looking like some emails do when things are repeated and people aren’t using the > sign to indicate it. When I didn’t have the font color looking like my blog everything defaulted totally to the left. I tried adding the “blockquote” attribute, and things went, well, weird. Seems the blog software, even if it’s an independent page, just doesn’t like that one.

In the end, I’m left with some conclusions. One, can it be done; yes. Two, is it worth trying to make everything look like the rest of your blog? No. Three, is that a major deal? Probably not, but I’m troubled with some of the formatting issues I was having, especially everything defaulting totally to the left. I’d hate to get into having to add that “nbsp” thing all the time (I didn’t type the code in correctly because then you wouldn’t see it here) to add spaces for every line; that’s ugly coding, and way too much work if you want to have a long page with lots of content and products on it. At some point it might be worth it to do things that way. For now, though, I think I’ll continue sending people to my S&S blog to see my weekly specials. So much easier to deal with.