Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Anger management

The Bee, a small creature teaches a lot to the human kind

Total Words: 384 Reading time: 1 min 36 secs

Anger is one thing which a human brings with himself right from birth. The only difference between two people would be the degree to which each person can control their anger before doing a 'blitz kreig' or say, can reach their threshold of being patient. A human, when he gets angry, does not realize the harm that he would be or have caused to the person in front of him. The degree of this harm can depend on the person in front at that time. Does a person in anger would realize what has he done ? Can he take some learnings from a small creature that god has created better known as the "bee" ?

A bee or a wasp can sting a human, which can harm the human a lot based on the power of the bee sting which has been described at different levels of pain by famous entomologists (for further reading refer Schmidt Sting Pain Index). A common bee sting can create an inflammation of the skin. A further point to be noticed is that when a honey bee stings, she is almost dead. Hence, a bee can sting only once in her life or in other words, the bee has to control her anger so that she can save herself by not stinging someone !! In turn a bee harming someone else, she harms herself more than the other !!

Doesnt that ring a bell in your human mind ?? It surely did when I came across this fact. Applying this fact to humans, a human should take care of not hurting anyone when in anger because he is in turn hurting himself more than the other. The other person might feel the pain of the sting but when it comes to one who is angry s/he might have hurt him/herself more and would have a hard time to
over come it.

So in simple terms, a bee teaches us that our anger should be managed well enough so that it does not hurt our relationship with others, not only because it hurts the relationship but it hurts our own souls more than the other person. Beware the next time when you get angry !!!

Friday, January 11, 2008

Change the width of your blog

Changing the width of your blog in Blogger new is very easy, only with some logical calculations. Traditional blog widths are basically made to suit 800x600 screen resolutions, but you can easily intercept them to change the width of your blog

Heres a small lesson on how to change the width of your blog:

Before changing the existing template, save the template by clicking the 'Download existing template' and then start making the changes.
Go to the Template and Edit HTML in the respective blog, from your dashboard in blogger.
Turn off the Expand Widget templates for further simplification
Find the following lines in the HTML

/* Outer-Wrapper
-----------------------------------------------
*/ #outer-wrapper {
width: 660px;
margin:0 auto;
padding:10px;
text-align:$startSide; font: $bodyfont;
}

#main-wrapper {
width: 410px;
float: $startSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}

#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px;
float: $endSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}

The Outer wrapper contains the main wrapper and the sider bar wrappers.The dimensions that specify those pages is the Width parameter. The positions of these wrappers are mentioned with the help of the "float" function. Notice that the outer wrapper does not have the float function as it is positioned in the center of the page which is specified by 'margin:0 auto:'

Change the "width parameter" in the Main Wrapper & the Sidebar wrapper and then change the width of the outer wrapper by the same amount as it has to accommodate itself to the new width.

Important:
Change only one dimension at a time and hit the 'Preview' button to see the changes before saving the changes
If you want to discard the changes you can always upload the previous template, you had downloaded before making the changes.

To change the width of the HEADER, look out for the following HTML code

/* Header

-----------------------------------------------
*/ #header-wrapper {
width:660px;
margin:0 auto 10px;
border:1px solid
$bordercolor;
}


Then change the 660px to whatever you want.

Remember to keep the width under 750 px to make your blog viewable for most of the screen resolutions.
Some templates may not have the 'Outer Wrapper' section, for which you can look out for the 'Body' section and changing which would get you the required changes in the width of the posts