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Changing text and background colors in MySpace?

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.


Dave's Answer:

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:

Only one word in this sentence is <font color="blue">blue</font>

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:

Only one word in this sentence is <span style="color:blue;">blue</span>

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:

Only one word in this sentence is <span style="color:blue;background-color:#fcc;">blue</span>

(#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

blue

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:

   

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!

How did I do that? Well, it's a little bit more complicated, but here's the source:

<div style="border:3px solid red; padding: 4px; background-color: #333; color:#fff; font-size:110%">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!</div>

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.



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Comments

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.

Posted by: mimi at May 18, 2007 7:54 AM

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?

Posted by: Dave Taylor at May 18, 2007 10:54 PM

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

Posted by: Simon Jackson at July 18, 2007 7:11 AM

if i make my back ground black
how can i change my comments to white?
xxx

Posted by: shernei at August 6, 2007 6:34 AM

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.

Posted by: kaydee at November 18, 2007 8:28 PM

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.

Posted by: Derek at December 3, 2007 5:26 PM

i changed my layout and its magenta but my about me box is still lime green how do i change it?

Posted by: lacey at February 11, 2008 9:23 AM

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!

Posted by: marjorie at March 18, 2008 3:46 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!









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