Add scrolling text to your blog

Scrolling text on a blog can be quite useful, especially if you want to alert your visitors to up-to-date news or information that they might want to hear about. It is often a good way of getting a message across to people that is easily distinguishable from all the written text on your blog. But often scrolling text can slow down your blog from loading and this can be a problem when you might have similar scrolling text or picture widgets, and a toolbar or two on your blog.

This particular scrolling text widget is searchable by Google, and probably other web search engines too.

There are lots and lots of scrolling text widgets available on the internet. I have found that most of them I came across were not customizable in any way or were of such poor quality that they actually slowed down my blog from loading, or would not scroll smoothly when the code was tweaked.

I got the marquee below from a website page on this site:
http://www.wishafriend.com/generators/scrollingtext but discovered once the marquee/scrolling text was created you can simply copy and paste the widget anywhere and it will work. The best thing about this scrolling text widget is it is fully customizable. You can add other bits of code to it and it will not be slowed down at all. I like to use this scrolling text widget a lot, and find it is the best one around that doesn't complicate things too much. It is easy to add information to, easy to customize and easy to add to your blog.

Here is the scrolling text code from wishafriend.com with a bit extra code in it:

<marquee style="width:100%; height:20px; background:#ffffff; margin:0 0 0px 0px;" direction="left" behavior="scroll" scrollamount="4">Add all your text here!</marquee>

To add this scrolling text widget to your blog, click on the "Design" link on your homepage, then click on any "Add a gadget" and select a "HTML/Javascript" widget from the"basics" section. Then you simply copy the code above and paste it into a "HTML/Javascript" widget in the "Edit widget" section, enter the text you want then click on "save". Click on "save" on the "Page Elements" section too as you just added a new widget, and then view your blog again.

At any time, day or night, you can re-edit the scrolling text widget, and update the text to something else. You can also add a background image to the text, add animated gifs or pictures to the scrolling text widget, and give it a border, etc. This widget is not one of those widgets that once you have the code you cannot change the code to suit your tastes or blog design. This widget can be changed whenever it suits YOU!

You can also change the direction of the text by changing "left" to "right", "up", or  "down", change the height and width of the width itself, and basically tweak it as much as you like. Also, the speed of the text scrolling by can be changed too. The "scrollamount" controls the scrolling speed. "scrollamount="4"" is a medium speed for the text but if you want the text to go faster change "4" to a higher number, like "6", for example. If you want the text to go slower change the "4" to a "2" - any number between "0" and "3" actually. "0" (zero) is the slowest speed ever for the scrolling text to travel at.

FOOTNOTE: If you are adding an animated gif or image that is larger than 20px in height, you must change the height of the scrolling text widget to match the size of your image otherwise the scrolling text will be pushed below the widget's margin and you will not see the text at all.

This is what the marquee looks like. A marquee is another word for scrolling text. I have given this one a yellow background and have set the text to bold.

Problem with marquee. If you add a lot of text, as in the above example, a lot of the text at the end will be cut off. To solve this problem set the marquee with to a higher % width. In the marquee below I have set the width to 200% and all the text is displayed within the marquee.

This is what the marquee looks like. A marquee is another word for scrolling text. I have given this one a yellow background and have set the text to bold.