The Advanced Appearance Editor will give you a bit more control over the appearance of your SigFeed than the Basic Appearance Editor, but it's a bit more difficult to use.
As with the Basic editor, the Konqueror web browser currently has problems with the color chooser controls this editor uses.
To use the Advanced Appearance Editor, select "Change Appearance (Advanced)" from the Action menu beneath the SigFeed you want to change on the SigFeeds page.
The first thing you need to do to use the Advanced editor is to create a background for your SigFeed. The Advanced editor works on the concept that you start with a background image that never changes, then define how the changing text which will appear on top of that image will look. So do that now; go into your image editor of choice and create a background for your SigFeed. Make sure it's no wider than 600 pixels and no taller than 200 pixels. And, of course, be sure to leave a blank space for where your blog entry titles will go.
Save your background in PNG, GIF, JPEG or BMP format (if you're not sure which to use, PNG will work best). If you use a PNG or GIF with an alpha channel (transparency), SigFeeder will honor that alpha channel. Don't close your image editor just yet — you may need it later.
Now for a run-down of the controls on this page.
As you probably guessed, this is the current appearance of your SigFeed. It works just as it does in the Basic editor.
This displays the current background image. If you want to change the background image, select "Use new:" then use the file upload control to select the new background image.
This is simply the number of entries you want your SigFeed to display. This can be between one and six entries.
Here, you can select how you want the text in your SigFeed to be aligned. When changing this value, keep in mind you'll need to change the "Entry list start point" (below) accordingly.
Depending on whether you chose left, center or right alignment above, this is the upper-left, upper-center, or upper-right "anchor" point for the list of text entries. This is where it can be handy to keep your image editor open; if it has a function which displays the coordinates of the pointer as you point it over the image, you can put the pointer at the point in your image you wish to be the upper-left/-center/-right point, then make note of what those coordinates are. Then put those points into these fields. It may take some experimentation to get the precise coordinates you're looking for.
This is the maximum width the entry text line should be horizontally. If the text exceeds this length, it will be truncated with an ellipsis. For example, "This is a Really Long Blog Entry Title" could become "This is a Really Long…" If you find that long blog entry titles are screwing up your image, try adjusting this number.
Select the font you want your entry text to appear in. Click the "Preview Fonts" to see an image with sample text in all of the fonts. Note that some of the fonts have compatibility with non-Latin character sets (sample text in Japanese Hiragana and Katakana, traditional and simplified Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, and Cyrillic are also shown on this image).
Select the font size. Easy.
You have two options here; you can use the color chooser control as on the Basic editor, or you can specify a color using hex notation (as used in HTML). Use the radio buttons to specify which one you want to use. Note that if you choose hex notation, you should enter the value without the # at the beginning as you would in HTML. Also note that you can set an alpha channel (transparency) by entering a value between 00 (fully opaque) and 7f (fully transparent) at the end of the normal color notation: for example, 00ff0033 will be a partially transparent shade of blue. This can cause some cool effects where your background image is still visible through your text.
Can ya guess?
If you want the date and/or time to appear next to your entry titles, use these menus to select the display format.
If you are going to display the date and/or time, where should that be displayed in relation to the entry title? You can select before, or after. Note that if you select after, it will not be truncated if the date and the title together pass the "Entry maximum width" value. So, for example, "This is a Really Long Blog Entry Title (Jan 21 7:23 AM)" might become "This is a Really Long… (Jan 21 7:23 AM)."
Here's where you can set the text size of the date text. You may find it aesthetically better to set the size to a smaller size than the title text.