Getting w.bloggar to use your site's theme

I finally figured out how to get w.bloggar to use my site’s style settings to give me a more accurate preview.

Turns out the options for controlling the preview rendering are located under Tools → Blog Properties (or F2 using the keyboard shortcut):

Under the Preview tab, there are 6 edit areas to help you customize the look of your preview:

Body Tag: here you can set various <body> attributes. There are some default values for you.

CSS Tag: here you can set the path to your site’s style sheet. This turned out not to be too useful for me – the WordPress theme I’m using sets the background colour to a very dark grey, then overrides that colour in the post. However, if you have a simple style sheet, or you want to knock up a simple version, you can always reference it here. In my case, I linked to my override style sheet – which contains the mods I made to the WordPress theme.

Title Style / Class: this allows you to set the font and size for the post title. I just made it bigger.

Post Style / Class: this allows you to set the font type and size for the post text. I just made mine bigger, the default size was too small for me.

Post Alignment: allows you to specify if your site left justifies, right justifies, centers, or full-justify your text (ok, full-justify was really awkward phrasing). This is obsolete (the way to do it is through CSS and not HTML), but, since it only affects the preview … who cares?

Post Width: allows you to specify how wide your site’s posts are in pixels. I set mine so the lines broke at about the same place using the font size I specified in Post Style / Class as my site. In this case, 1000 pixels did the trick.

This was the original “squinty eye” version (click for a larger image):

This is the updated version (click for a larger image):

Too bad it is no longer being developed. Despite some roughness, this client is definitely well beyond anything on offer now (aside from Windows Live Writer, but since WLW has an issue with increasing my image sizes, I’m sticking with w.bloggar) – it has a very flexible (albeit cramped) way to fine tune the Preview