Murder is Bad - A Guide to Customising Your Blogger Page

If you're wondering how to customise your blog, here are a few pointers as to where to begin. These notes presuppose the following:
A knowledge of HTML and how HTML documents are structured
A knowledge of CSS
Log in to your blog and head to the template if you want to make any alterations. The template is an HTML file that contains some CSS styling information, some standard HTML and a few bits of Blogger code that tell Blogger what to put on the page, and when. If you want to take a close look at the file I suggest copying the contents and pasting them into your favourite text editor. Note: this one file does a lot of spade work - it generates every page on your blog.
The Blogger template consists of three entities:
The CSS (found enclosed in Style tags in the head of your Blogger HTML file).
This controls the appearance and layout of your page.
The Blogger code.
This retrieves information from your blog database (e.g. the posts, the comments, the title, your profile) and determines on what pages it appears. For example, you could tell Blogger to display all of a post's comments only on its own page, rather than on the blog's home page. The CSS determines where on the selected page the information will appear.
The HTML.
This allows you to add content that is not on your blog database (e.g. a link to an external site). It also allows you to wrap items from the blog database in normal HTML tags (e.g. you may want to place the blog title in some h1 tags. You would then use CSS to customise the appearance of the h1 tag.)
Assuming you have some knowledge of CSS and HTML, the only challenge is in working out how the Blogger code works. Luckily, Blogger code comes in the form of HTML-like tags, so it's easy to learn.
Simply remember that there are two types of tags:
Item tags
Tags that tell Blogger to retrieve information from your blog database, and put it on the page. Like HTML tags, these are enclosed by angled brackets. Unlike HTML tags, they are also enclosed by dollar signs. Example: <$BlogTitle$> - tells Blogger to display the Blog's title on the page.
Page tags
Tags that tell Blogger when to display the information retrieved by item tags. These are only enclosed by angled brackets and, like HTML, come in pairs. The second page tag is closed with a forward slash (again, just like HTML). Example: Any information that an item tag retrieves (or any HTML) enclosed in tags will only be displayed on your blog's main page - it would not appear on the archive page.