Well, I finally managed to find enough bits and pieces of information to create a 3-column template in blogger (yay!). I also learned how to upload one's own header image, so now I have a custom one that I put together in GIMP.
I'm updating my lists of links and working on changing a few more color elements, but the parts I thought were going to be really hard seem to be done for the most part already.
I use Firefox as my primary browser and so far it looks OK to me (in the sense of not having bizarre line wrapping behavior, elements overlapping each other when they shouldn't, things out of alignment, etc.).
So if anyone reading this is running IE or Opera or some other browser, and if anything on the page looks weird to you, please let me know. I am slowly bringing my HTML skills into the 21st century here so it may take some fiddling to get everything to show up right across the various platforms in use these days.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
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15 comments:
I like the header.
The header is very pretty. I have IE7, and everything looks good so far.
You made this? It's awesome.
Wow, that's a big change. Will probably take me a while to get used to (*right now* i'm still in the phase of thinking "but the old one looked better!"... but i do that *every* time anyone on my blogroll changes their layout/colour scheme)... i think i would definitely like it if i was encountering your blog for the first time, tho... :)
On my monitor your blog is wider than the screen. This may be because it's a crappy old monitor tho (or i might have the wrong screen settings or something).
I really like the 3-column layout tho. It's actually very close to what i would ideally like to do with my blog - how difficult was it to do?
(I'd also like to create a custom header image as well, but definitely need to learn more GIMP skills before doing that. The idea in my head is a sort of collage/composite of several photos and other images, but it would be a similar size to yours...)
I need to learn these sort of skills in general.
I like the header, too--it's gorgeous.
Everything looks fine to me, but I'm a Firefox user, too (on a Mac with a 20" screen).
Esaj: Thanks. I definitely enjoyed making it (the header).
krayryal: That's good it is showing up OK. IE was the one I was sort of worried about.
Arnt Richard: Well, I made the header, but I did not come up with the template and I had a lot of help from the various tutorials I found in getting the 3 columns to show up, etc. Also, re. the header and GIMP: one of the coolest things I've found is custom brushes. Some of the shapes in the header image are basically like "stamps" -- the program comes with some of them by default, but there are also tons and tons of them online that you can download, so I got a few of those that looked interesting (that's how I got the moon graphic and that weird circular orange thing). Also if you want really pretty results from GIMP, learning to use layers and play with object transparency is very helpful.
shiva: Yeah I am thinking of playing a *bit* with the widths - I might be able to narrow the side columns somewhat. But I really really like the 3 columns a lot. I am planning on keeping links to other blogs and sites in the right hand column, and using the left hand column for the profile and for a list of links to previous posts I've written. There are some questions that seem to come up time and time again, and I think it would be neat to have a sort of list right on the front of the blog where people could access different topical articles. E.g., I'd have an autism section for sure, and a biogerontology section, and probably a few others, but it would be a lot easier to navigate than archives.
As far as the difficulty of the 3 column layout - I selected first the Thisaway template from the list of available blogger defaults, then found a tutorial thing on changing that *particular* template to 3 columns. It was not that difficult, actually -- took me only about 3 hours to get it from "old style" to "how it looks now". The thing that's sort of weird about templates I've found is that they seem to have some color elements that are purely specified by HTML codes, but others where there's an actual graphic the page source links to somewhere. And it's not always easy to tell what's what by looking at it. Initially when I changed what I thought was the background to dark brown, I ended up only changing half the page -- the other half remained orange, and it turned out that the orange was a pointed-to graphic as opposed to an HTML specification. So in order to make the whole background brown, I just disabled that graphic link (commented it out).
As for what I'd still like to do, I plan to get rid of some of those little "arrow" graphics next to various list items, change the text background color, and embolden the borders between the sidebars and the main post section. I don't know exactly how to do that yet but I am learning as I go...
Tera: Oh cool -- good to know things look ok on a Mac as well (I am not sure how much, if at all, browser implementations on different operating systems differ).
Looks good in Safari!
-Michael G.R.
This looks beautiful! I love it!
Mike: Thanks! Glad to know it works in Safari.
Robin: Thanks. I've had an image of something like this for ages in my head re. this blog, and it is nice to have it finally there. It feels more like my internet-home now.
Anne - could you send me a link to the tutorial on how to make a Blogger template into a 3-column one? I'm really unhappy with my blog's appearance at the moment, and 3-column-ising it would probably the the biggest step towards becoming happy with it...
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