I recently discovered a way to customize an ActiveRain blog. I then shared the idea on ActiveRain and even wrote a tutorial on how you can do it. The problem was that it required "coding" skills and had a potential problem with a few pages on ActiveRain. So I went back to the drawing board and figured out a way to easily create a customized Active Rain blog without any CSS/HTML knowledge and without interfering with AR's "Blog Roll" pages.
The Active Rain Custom Blog Generator
I realize that for most of you, your job is to know about Real Estate, not Web Design. With that in mind, I created the Active Rain Custom Blog Generator. It requires no knowledge of CSS or HTML, you simply answer a few questions, and it does all the hard work for you!
No More HTML Editing
Another problem with the old approach was that you had to manually add HTML code to every post that you wrote! With this new system, you simply add one line of code to your sidebar, and every post you have ever written will have your customized style!
It Plays Nice with Active Rain's Blog Roll
When Bob from ActiveRain saw my fist blog post about customizing the Active Rain blog, he pointed out that there are certain areas of ActiveRain that shows multiple posts from different people. Under the old approach, if multiple people customized their blog, then it could "break" those pages. The new approach addresses this and plays nicely with these pages. This is because with the new approach, you don’t add anything to individual blog posts. I felt bad that ActiveRain would have to change their system in order to accommodate my old approach, so I am glad that the new one fixes this. AR doesn’t have to change a thing to their code.I am still waiting on the official "okay" from AR on this but given their feedback so far, they seem to want to work out a way to keep this feature available to the AR Community. Once again, kudos to AR for being so open minded and forward thinking!
The Active Rain Custom Blog Generator is located here. Feel free to play around with it and let me know what you think. This is just the "beta" version. I hope to add more features and flexibility in the near future. If you want to stay updated of enhancements to the Custom Blog Generator, just click here to subscribe to my ActiveRain blog.
By the way, the design that you see on my ActiveRain blog was created using the Generator. I didn't write any CSS or HTML to achieve this look.
Disclaimer: This is not a feature from ActiveRain, I do not work for AR (unless they want to hire me) :-) and I am sure ActiveRain will not provide Technical Support for this. So proceed at your own risk. I am not responsible for anything that you do to your ActiveRain blog.
Thanks,
Brad
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