Community Server on my mind

CS2: Skinning: Change the title image of your blog without access to the CSS file

I'd never have thought I'd write an article about skinning. I am not very good at CSS. But sometimes you learn when you have to, although what I'll talk about in this article is in no way anything complicated.

In Community Server you know you can change the skin of your blog to a skin that's installed at the CS site where the blog is. But sometimes you might want to change how that skin looks, even if most of it looks really good. If you're at for example weblogs.asp.net or some other CS hosted blog site, you can't do that since you don't have access to the files of the skin. But CS has a workaround for that called CSS Overrides. With that function, as you can hear from the name, you can override what's in the original stylesheet for the skin you are using. So of course, you need some way to figure out what the name of the CSS classes are that you want to modify. But mostly, the skins are available to download for free in some way.

In my case I wanted to chage the header picture for the Paperclip theme. I looked in the CSS file for it and found the class was named 'masthead' with that information I could change the header picture by overriding the masthead class's background-image as shown in the picture below.

Now it's good if your new image has about the same dimensions as the original one, at least in width.