allright. Cynthia Larsen, blogger extraordinaire, asked me to show y'all how to use Firefox and ScribeFire to put Coloured text into your blogging.
this post presumes that you're using Firefox as your browser. (If you're not, why not?). If you're not, you can download a free copy here. G'head, download it... I'll wait. I'll even give 'ya a little "walkin' music".
Okay... didja download that already... Good! Now, we're also presuming that you're using ScribeFire, and you've added it to your Firefox. What, No? Okay, go ahead and download ScribeFire for free (you can find it here), and attach it to your FireFox. I'll wait... what, you want some more "walking music"? You liked, that, eh? Okay... here's some more.
Okay... you're back! Well, you said you said you liked it. Allright, so here we go. Using Firefox as your browser (none of that Explorer, or even Google Chrome) open up a new post (or you could open one of your old posts, if you just want to play).... If you've installed ScribeFire properly, you should see an icon at the bottom right of Firefox that looks like this:
See the little orange "note pad"... that's ScribeFire. Go ahead and click on it.
When you click on that little memo pad... you should see a window that opens up at the bottom of your screen, that looks a lot like the one above. With some small allowances for the fact that I'm using a Mac, and if you're using the PC it will look slightly different. (not better, not worse... just different).
Okay... now in that text block area.... type a sentence or a word that you'd like to have in colour. Go ahead, try it... let's try something silly like:
Allright... now let's select a part of it to make coloured, just by "dragging through it" (or double-clicking on the word if appropriate)... once it's "selected" is should be "highlighted" (ignore the little red-underlines on mine... that's the spellchecker trying to tell me that it doesn't recognize the word "Toodle-oo".
Now... while the words are still "selected"... go up above the words to 
that box that appears solid black!! If you click (just once) on it, you'll see a wonderful array of colours displayed. Click on one of them, and you'll see the word you had selected will change to that colour. I'm gonna pick RED... bright RED which is 3 boxes down from the top, in the "RED" column.
Now, I'm gonna get a little fancy. I'm gonna select all the letters EXCEPT the first and last of the word. When you've got them... pick a DIFFERENT colour. I'm gonna choose bright green (3 down). And then again... "odle-" in Blue (4 down).
Okay.. now a little "showing off". Let's select the entire "blue" area, and hit the Bold "B" Directly above it... that will make 
the blue letters BOLD. And one more trick... let's select "dle", and click on the icon two to the left of the colour block.
It looks like a capital letter "T" with an UP arrow next to it. In the sample I have here, I clicked on that icon twice. As you can see the "up" arrow makes the type larger... one click at a time. If you had clicked on the T with the DOWN arrow... it would have made it smaller.
"Alan, Alan!" I hear you say... "This is all great fun, but the new text with the colour is still in the ScribeFire window... when are you gonna show me how to put it into my blog?"
Well, no time better than now, right? So, it's pretty simple. All you have to do is drag through the entire phrase....
Copy it.
And put your cursor in your blog window... and hit "paste": and here it is: East St. Louis Toodle-oo.
Experiment with ScribeFire... there are lots of things it does, and I have no idea what they are... .this is really all I use it for. And while it may seem pretty complicated... it really isn't. Once you get used to it, it's like second nature!
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