Customizing your blog
You can change how your blog looks and what sits around your posts. Every setting here is on your blog's page in the dashboard, and each change shows on the blog right away, as soon as you save it.
Colors, fonts and layout
Your link color can be blue, green, red, purple or graphite. Every link on the blog uses it.
Fonts
- Serif
- A classic book face with small strokes at the ends of the letters. It is comfortable for long reading.
- Sans-serif
- Plain, clean letters.
- Monospace
- Every letter takes the same width, like code on a screen.
The blog uses fonts that are already on each reader's phone or computer. Nothing extra is downloaded, so pages stay quick, and the exact letters can differ a little from one device to another.
Dark mode
There is no switch for dark mode. Your blog turns dark by itself when a reader's device is set to dark, and it stays light for everyone else. Each link color has a lighter shade for the dark pages, so links remain easy to read.
Home page layout
- Compact
- Each post is a date and a title. It suits channels with many short posts.
- Summary
- The date, the title and the first lines of the post. New blogs start with this one.
- Photos
- The date, the title and the first photo of the post, for channels that are mostly pictures.
What shows on the blog
Three switches decide what readers see around your posts. You can turn off the dates, the view counts and the "Made with Bloggram" line in the footer. The Report abuse link in the footer is always there.
Hiding dates takes them off the pages people read. Your RSS feed, your sitemap and the data search engines read keep each post's date, since apps and search engines need it to sort and refresh your posts. A post without a title is then named after its number instead of its date.
Logo
Your logo is the blog's favicon, the small icon in a browser tab. It is also the icon people get when they add your blog to a phone's home screen, and a round picture next to the blog's name at the top of every page.
Upload a PNG or JPEG of 128 to 2048 pixels a side and up to 2 MB. A square image of at least 512 pixels looks best. Other shapes are cut to a square from the middle.
Until you upload one, the blog uses your channel's photo. It follows the channel, too: when you change the photo in Telegram the blog gets the new one, and when you delete it the logo goes away. A logo you uploaded stays as it is, whatever you do with the channel photo.
Two buttons sit under the upload field. Use the channel photo brings the channel's photo back after an upload, and it shows while the bot is in your channel. Remove takes the logo off. If you change the channel photo in Telegram after that, the blog picks it up again.
You can make 10 logo changes an hour. Uploads and Use the channel photo count together.
The line under your blog's name
A small line under the blog's name holds the About page, your links and the tag menu. Each part appears once you have set it up.
About page
Write about yourself or the channel in up to 2,000 characters of plain text. A blank line starts a new paragraph. If you leave it empty, the About page shows the blog description. With neither one, the blog has no About page and the line leaves the link out.
Links
You can add up to 6 links to your site, a shop or your other profiles. Each one needs a label of up to 40 characters and a full address that starts with http:// or https://. Rows you leave empty are skipped.
Tick "This is me" for pages that are yours, such as a Mastodon profile. That link gets rel="me", which Mastodon and similar sites look for to confirm that the blog and the profile belong to the same person. Add a link to your blog on that profile as well and the check can go through.
The links can sit in the line under the blog's name or in the footer of every page.
Tag menu
The tag menu links up to 8 tags to their pages. Bloggram can pick the ones you use most, or you can list your own, one per line, with or without the #. A tag with no visible post is left out of the menu until it has one again.
Pinned post
A pinned post leads the first page of your home page with a Pinned mark, and it isn't repeated further down. Older pages and tag pages stay as they are.
There are two ways to pin a post. Pin it in your Telegram channel and the blog follows along: pin another message and the blog switches to it, unpin it in Telegram and it leaves the blog at Bloggram's next check of the channel. You can also press Pin to top next to a post in the dashboard. That pin takes over from the Telegram one and stays until you unpin it in the dashboard.
A post pinned in Telegram has no Unpin button in the dashboard, because Bloggram would pin it again at its next check of the channel. Unpin it in Telegram instead. Hiding or deleting the pinned post removes the pin.
More about the rest of the blog's page is in The dashboard.