Customizing Your MySpace Blog Settings

The "Customize My Blog" section of MySpace looks intimidating with its numeric choices for colors, page headers and side modules. But on closer look it's easier than you think.

First, you don't need to know the exact numeric code for the color desired, though if you do that's fine too. Instead, click on the icon that looks like a painter's palette and choose the color that you'd like to try. Use the "preview" link to see whether you like the change or not. If so, look at the question across the top of your screen that asks "Would you like to use this as your Look and Feel?" and choose "yes". If not, choose "no". This will take you back to the editing screen where you can tweak the settings further.

To adjust the width setting, enter a percentage and preview until you achieve the look you like. This adjusts the width of the blog posts as it displays across the screen.

The page header defaults to none. If you would like a title, choose "Custom header" and enter the title of your blog under the site name field. Add a tag line to follow if desired under the tag line field. You can change the font, the font size and the font color in the fields that follow. Once again, clicking the preview link will show you how your choices will look on screen. For those with HTML skills, there's an option for entering a page header using the HTML language.

If you'd like the header to blend into the background rather than be boxed as the default, make sure to enter the same numeric code for both the interior color as well as the border. The quickest way is to simply copy the code from the background color box and paste it into the header color fields.

The side module allows you to change the look and feel of the information displayed alongside your blog posts. You can choose to have a side bar on either the right or the left side, adjust the colors and alignment and pick what information you'd like displayed there. If you don't want your gender or age displayed, be sure to come to this section and choose not to display this as the MySpace default is set to show this.

The blog post and comment post settings use similar instructions as the background and header settings.

You can add a background image or music to your MySpace blog in the next section. Unfortunately you can't simply upload the image or music file, instead the image or music file must be hosted somewhere on the web with an address. The internet has a wide variety of sites that will host your image or music files for free or for a small fee.

For the more advanced user, adding a custom style sheet can be done in the final section by using the box provided.