Sunday, November 29, 2009

How to host your Blogger theme images

I was thinking on the topic for my first blog post. Suddenly, I realized that there is one little problem I just solved and probably should share with others.

I was searching for a good simple theme for my new software development oriented blog. There are some nice free themes to start with on the net. I picked one, customized a little bit (few css and image tweaks), and just before saving it in Blogger Settings Layout panel, my brain threw an exception, saying: “Man, you need some place to host your theme image files!”. Fortunately, I managed to catch that and after some stack trace investigation came up with a few possible recovery solutions:
  • Find similar images (mostly background) on the net and use that
  • Host images on some free/paid hosting site
  • Host images on Blogger itself
Well, the first one is not reliable, at least, and although images in my theme are very simple I would have to find similar ones. Second one is not logical, if I need some place to host something related to my blog on Blogger, than why do I need Blogger at all? The last one seems to be the most reliable and elegant solution. And actually simple one.

All you need is to create a new post, insert all the images used in your theme and publish it (or save as a draft if you do not want everyone to see some strange post with a list of 1px wide images). That’s it. If you see your images in your browser than Blogger hosts them, right? Then there is some URL, right? Absolutely. Now you need to update your theme with URLs of the images from your post hosted on Blogger.

Well, in fact, this post is exactly that post which contains those 2 images used in my theme. You can see them below.




Ok, this is my first post on this blog and I hope it will be useful to someone. If it is, please drop some note below. It is really nice to hear that these few bytes of information help someone.