Slogging blogger haunted by HTML

If you're reading this right now, which I'm pretty sure you are...you can see my blog has an interesting format change, one that has consumed me for the past two nights. Ever since creating my blog, I have been frustrated that the format so kindly provided by Blogspot only showed my content in a strip down the center of the screen. I'd admired blogs that lavishly used the entire screen width available, and longed to have the tech savvy to make the look of my blog more individualized and professional.

Finally, I asked a fellow blogger who hosts just such an expansively attractive site to help me. I'd already played with all the menu toys Blogspot offers but no tab said "make blog fatter" or even "fill up the screen width." So my friend took me for a (limited by his knowledge) foray into html.

The html jungle is filled with strange symbols, carets, dollar signs, lots of semi-colons, curly enclosures and a few recognizable words. That have strange meanings. Wrapper is not what your groceries come in. Padding is not what you end up with after a month of gluttony. "Startside" and "endside" are not the before-and-after of a political campaign. Nor are they at the "start" or the "end." They are, however, at the "side."

Now you know why I've had time for little else.

In my quest to get the background box from which my posts bleed to actually encompass the entirety of my posts, I have spent many an hour reading. The help button for Blogspot led me to many time-leaching sites, and the blogosphere is filled with an interesting plethora of pleas. (How someone got away with repeatedly posting a screaming all-caps ad for "BANGLAORE ESCORTS FEMALE ESCORTS IN BANGLAORE CALL GIRLS..." in the Google Blogger Help website is, however, beyond me.) But mostly there were questions like mine, with answers by programming stars who each had their own followings and websites and awards. It's a fascinating world, down in the darkened cellar of computer-dom. I nearly said "windowless cellar," but I suppose a majority of these programming moles do use Microsoft.

Unfortunately, even after scrolling through 300 desperate posts asking for help, I never found exactly my dilemma. Lots of people, however, seem to have the same aim as I do--to expand their blogs to fill the width of the screen. I spent time reading html tutorials, trying to extrapolate how to apply these plumping suggestions to the box behind my posts. I learned that "em" is better to use than "px," and why (just ask me!), and that one must be extremely cautious to insert semi-colons and spaces just so or risk a common complaint seen in the Google Bloggers' queries: "Help! I lost my blog!"

Made me rather grateful that mine's still here, even with the awkward-looking background border ending three-fourths of the way through my text. I'm hoping that maybe by tomorrow, if help comes through, I'll have a broad blog with big box.