Blogger Link Colors

I had the hardest time trying to fix the color of the links here in Blogger. It used to look like this.

Actually the blue was quite a bit brighter and it virtually strobed against the pale tan background. I wanted a less jarring color. I was also unable to change the color of the title.

I tried to fix it through the Customize/Layout/Fonts and Colors - controls and that made no difference.

I Googled around and found some suggestion on how to change them in HTML. I opened up the HTML through Customize/Layout/Edit HTML and saved a copy before making any changes. The variables for the text were already set to the colors which I had specified in Fonts and Colors. Further down, in the section with "a:link", "a:visited", and "a:hover" the colors were assigned by the variables above. I tried substituting specific colors for the variables, but it made no difference. (I'm only barely HTML literate.)

Then I tried radical changes. I selected a whole different template. That changes the appearance dramatically, but the color of the title and of the links didn't change. That indicated to me that template was not causing the trouble. I thought it was the template which controlled this, but apparently not.

Then I learned something interesting. If I only display one posting at a time, the colors I specified do show! That indicated again that there must be some code outside of the template which caused the problem. The only remaining place is in a posting. I don't know why this would be, but it seems to have been the case. Here's what I did:

1. I decreased the number of posts displayed at a time - Customize/Settings/Formatting/Show - to five. At that point, my first page looked right. It didn't have the bright colored links.
   
2. I went through the pages to see when the bright colored links were displayed.
   
3. On the page which had the problem, I looked at each posting one at a time. I found the one posting which had the problem.
   
4. I looked at the HTML for that posting and there was a ton of code which I didn't recognize and which didn't seem to have anything to do with the text or the pictures. (I was experimenting with using an online blog editor and MS Word to write blog posts at about that time. I suspect that caused the problem.) I deleted the excess HTML and the bright blue was gone!
   

I had to go back and play with the settings again, but I could do it with the standard controls at Customize/Layout/Fonts and Colors and it worked just fine.

Eureka!

Before I figured this out I had no luck finding instructions which related to the problem above. Now that I figured it out and wrote the above, all the instructions which comes up relate to this problem. (frustration) I recommend the clear instructions by BlogBulk.