On my friend’s myspace profiles they have a color box around their comments and the text is in diffent colour too. I’ve asked them how they did it but they say they forgot. so how do you do it.
Great question, actually, and one that lets me write about the basics of changing the text color and playing with background colors on MySpace and anywhere else you can add HTML comments!
There are two ways to approach this: you can use the “old school” way of using the FONT tag, or the fancy new CSS way which is far more flexible, but a wee bit more complicated. I prefer the latter because it gives you soooo much power, but let me start by showing you how to change text color with the FONT tag:
That’s the basic approach to making a word, phrase, or paragraph change color. Instead of “blue” you can use a range of different color names, or if you want to put on your geek hat, you can also specify what’s called a hexadecimal RGB value. Those are more complicated — blue would be #0000FF for example – but I also have a handy reference chart to help.
The problem with using the FONT tag is that you can’t change the background color of the text, so you can’t do anything cool like white text in a black box. With CSS you can do that and a ton more. Just about any HTML tag can include CSS formatting information, but a good technique is to use SPAN for inline changes and DIV for block changes. That is, if you want to just change one word in a sentence, that’s a job for SPAN, but if you want to change an entire paragraph to, say, have a different background color, that’s a DIV task.
Here’s that same simple example with CSS:
Not too dissimilar, but what’s cool is that you can now change things like the background as part of that style specification, you just separate attributes with a semicolon:
(#fcc is a light red. #fff is white and #000 is black). Here’s how it looks:
Only one word in this sentence is blue
Nice, isn’t it? Now if we do the exact same sequence with a DIV tag, you’ll see what happens:
Only one word in this sentence is
Quite different. Now you can see how a “block” is really a paragraph. But the DIV tag is quite useful too because you can use it to create attractive blocks of information, like this:
How did I do that? Well, it’s a little bit more complicated, but here’s the source:
The red border is produced with border: 3px solid red, the gray background is produced with background-color:#333, the text is turned white with color:#fff (if you want to use “text-color” it’ll fail, but I admit, I often type that in without thinking and have to fix it too), the spacing between the text and the edge of the box is expanded just a little bit with padding:4px and, finally, I make the text just a little bit larger with font-size:110%.
There are a million ways you can tweak HTML with CSS elements to get the exact result you seek, so it’s far more than I can detail here, but I will tell you that I have a book that steps you through each and every CSS attribute, with examples, that you can find at your local bookstore or here online: Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML and CSS. It might be a great way to get the results you seek.
I have had a myspace for several years and obviously started out w/profile 1.0, but I don’t want to switch to 2.0-don’t like it!! My question? How can I change just my background, but WITHOUT MESSING UP or DELETING my individual typed stuff(about me, who i would like to meet, ect)?? I know if there is a way, you would know!!!!! And I’m totally SCARED to try it on my own or just figuring it out,though it would give me much gained knowledge and having to start my profile ALL OVER! HAHAHA
Thanks, E
Dude, this stuff is very helpful. Gracias, thanks man(: This be fantastico xD I always wanted stuff like the background, but the border? That’s just beyond it all:3 <3
Hello Darling Dave.
I love ALL your codes they help me so much. THEY help me get on with my day to day myspacing life. I wish I could somehow meet you.
thank you for putting this on here.
it is kind of confusing.
i was wondering how to put a border around your about me section, or your heroes, or any section. just like a different colored border. if you could tell me, i would really appreciate it. thanks(:
Hi Jessica! You want the “STRIKE” HTML tag. You can use it by putting <strike> before what you want crossed out and </strike> afterwards.
Hey. um. how do you write things and cross of some of the words?? i mean like putt a line in the middle of the word.
Hi Dave,
I need to delete a person who “added me as their pet” with a special application under the “GulfWarLegal” myspace site. This is important, but it has been since summer of last year that I last used this site and I’ve forgotten the password and email address since then. Can you help me? I’ll even pay for your help. Thank you, Josh
thank 4 ur teaching
i learn many at here…
thank…
i cant get on myspace at school cause they blocked it can u help me get on?
hey i already knew this was possible for myspace, but do you have any tricks like these for facebook because they dont work there
thanks 😀 it truelly helps ! 😀
This is an example of the slick formatting you can produce with basic CSS that will work in a MySpace comment, in a Blogger weblog entry, just about anywhere you can enter HTML. And it’s easy too!
i changed my layout and its magenta but my about me box is still lime green how do i change it?
Hey i need some help…
I am redoing a profile for a friend, and i have a dark background, that makes it very hard to read the comments posted on the profile. Is there an easy trick to changed the font color from black to white? myspace beta editor has no option for this, and i dont like thomas’ editor.
hey i was wondering if you would be able to let me no how you can change the colour of you columns and that bit around it? I have an actual background colour wich i want to keep, but i want to change the inner white part of it to another colour. could you help me? thanks.
if i make my back ground black
how can i change my comments to white?
xxx
I’ve accidentally changed my blog titles to the background colour, so they’re now invisible. I’ve tried changing every font colour in edit profile, but none of them seem to make the actual blog title visible, although I can easily change the ‘more’ link after the title. Any ideas where I might be going wrong?
Thanks,
SJ
Mimi, thanks for your feedback! I have a lot of MySpace readers, so I try to help out when I can, but I also have a LOT of other material that shows up every week too. What specific topics did you seek?
please! no more myspace articles! how about stuff that appeals to a wider age range of people, or at least tips on a website that DOESN’T suck! Dave, you’re a smart guy, and we’re smart people, please help us with stuff that can really increase productivity.