Blogging Blues

Those of you who read this blog (I'm talking to you, Surayah), would have noticed spanners and wrenches in my sidebar and  pencils directly underneath the posts. I have no idea how they got there.

 Last time I blogged and saved - as one does - nothing out of the ordinary was present, just the usual blood, sweat and tears left on the post. (Yes, you read right - blogging is not for sissies). The next time I opened the blog, voila! There they were, cute little edit icons. New innovation from Google I thought. Then the realisation that no-one else had them and, oh no! I've done something wrong, AGAIN! They soon lost their charm after that and I spent the better part of last week and this afternoon trying to remove them.

Here's what I learnt after hours of trying:

• To remove the pencil edit icon, simply go to layout and 'unclick' the 'quickedit' option.
• Removing the spanners and wrenches were way more complicated. There were no simple instructions in Blogger help. You'd have to have a Phd in HTML to understand their instructions.Fortunately, I came across some really easy instructions in a blog simply entitled 'Spice up your Blog'. This time you used the Template option, go to customise, then advance, choose CSS and type in a code, which you then saved and applied to your blog. One visit to the diigo account assured that all was well in blogland.

But alas and alack, beyond the horizon were more horrors. Unfortunately, during my travails, I've picked up malware. That's malevolent software to the uniniated. So far, all it's done is something called 'text - enhance' which links certain words in my blog to spam ads. Now, I've been looking for a solution to this for the past few hours, nothing so far (that I understand), but I'm calling it a night. Not throwing in the towel - we librarians never do - but I'll live to fight/find another day.