dinking around in Blogger

Well, it's been over a year-and-a-half since Blogger finalized their new template customizing interface. Fortunately, it's still backwards compatible with everyone's personalized templates/CSS/HTML from the previous version. But I've been avoiding learning their new "widget" coding system; while the web-based interface for changing colors and fonts is much easier, the hard-core HTML code guts is more complicated. Plus, at first, you couldn't do some (I thought) pretty basic stuff, like f'rinstance using a graphic for your header, instead of text.

So tonight, I thought I'd try to see if I could customize one of the new Blogger templates to match the existing Going 2 NM layout. This is what I came up with, after an hour or so of dinking around (you may need to reload/refresh the page). But some stuff is different. The underlines for links aren't the same. The "Recent Posts" are now part of the Archives (mandatory). You'll note the blog "description" above the title is missing — couldn't replace just the title with the graphic, had to replace both the title and the description. >...sigh...< As a designer, it's the lack of control over details like that that bug me.

But I'll keep trying to get stuff back the way I'd like it (or decide to live with it this way). It's going to take more poking around in the HTML/widget code. Just not tonight.