Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Customizing MySpace

I've had a page on MySpace since sometime late in 2005, when I signed on because a friend invited me there. From the time I started the page I was daunted by the peculiar steps necessary in order to customize my profile page. I was so daunted, in fact, that I simply put off trying to fix it until I could get some decent instructions.

I made a few forays into Google searches for any hints about how one should do it, and kept giving up. Until this week. Thanks to Cynthia Closkey, a bona fide web designer active on Pittsburgh Bloggers, I found a pointer to an article by Mike Davidson who took on the challenge of writing the code necessary to customize a MySpace profile so it would look decent.

It took me a while to follow Mike's instructions and Cynthia's example. The problem I faced was that I usually edit code in the Windows notepad, but when I copied from notepad into the Myspace forms for editing my profile, something kept going wrong so that my graphics did not show up at all. Eventually, I simply copied Mike's code directly into the MySpace forms and edited the code right in the form. That worked.

I don't have all the design for my MySpace profile in a final form, but at last I have something that doesn't embarrass me, and I can fine-tune it at my leisure.

There are a large number of bloggers who have started their blogs on MySpace. Because my blog was already going strong when I signed onto Myspace, I decided I would simply use the MySpace blog to point to this blog. Feedburner's Headline Animator works very well for that purpose. A single entry in my MySpace blog has the code for the graphic that will be generated fresh whenever needed, and will always display the titles of a handful of my recent articles on this blog.

File under :

No comments: