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Add A Customized Search Box To Your Blog

Photo courtesy of Francesco S on Flickr

I thought recently how useful it would be to be able to search a blog to find posts that interest me and apart from the blog archive in the sidebar I didn't know how I could do this. Then I noticed the search box gadget on Blogger. Is this new? I've only just noticed it but knowing my powers of observation it's probably been there for quite a while!

So I added it. And was a bit underwhelmed to be honest. It's a search box that works but.........it's grey and just a bit boring. It didn't fit in with my blog either. I like tweaking my blog and enjoy customizing things to make it look a bit more interesting and colourful. So the grey search box didn't stay for long.

No, I added a customized version.

You can see it up there.

 It's quite nice isn't it? I think so anyway and it fits in with the rest of my blog.
Here's the code for it courtesy of Tweak Peak. It's fairly simple to do - just copy the code and add it to the HTML "Add a gadget" in Blogger. 
Tweak Peak has added some changes you can make to the code to alter the search bar in various ways too, such as text size, border thickness and colours. 

One thing I could not do though was to change the colour of the search box text no matter how many times I tried. The default colour is grey which I didn't like so I deleted the text altogether and made my own text graphic in Paint Shop Pro which I then uploaded to Photobucket. I then added the html code for the graphic to the beginning of the search box code and now I have my own tweaked search box {that works!} Anyone wanting to read more posts about a particular thing I've posted about previously just need to add their search words to the box and press Go! and up comes a page with the relevant posts.

I did find a really nice search box on another site but soon realized that while it looked great it didn't actually work......


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Comments

  1. I love the search bar! Since I use my blog as somewhat of a journal it makes it easy for me to look things up. I love how you prettied yours up!

    ReplyDelete

  2. I'm so excited about your find! The blogger search never worked on my blog and I hated not being able to search. This solved the problem - and it looks great. Thank you!!

    ReplyDelete

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