Blog Template

After spending years making my blog template more and more busy - adding columns filled with links, widgets, and goo-gaws, I've decided it's time for a simple template.

I enjoyed learning the HTML and CSS I used to set up my custom template of about a year ago, but now I'm in a mood for simplicity.

This will do

All right, spent a few hours fiddling with the template this morning and I have the blog in a decent condition.

I don't now if there will ever be quite enough control for my taste - I feel the need to be able to tweak every little element.

The fact that apostrophes and quotes are interpreted just fine by some of the 'gadgets' and interpreted as garbage by others (like 'Recent Comments') is truly vexing. Am I the only one troubled by stuff like that? Should I accept that formatting online will never be perfect?

I have a placeholder Flickr thing going, only about ten pics total in my photostream. I really need to go through the PC and categorize all of our pics, delete duplicates, etc.

I also need to call my folks - it's my Mom's Birthday and of course it's Father's Day as well.

New Design

Yeah, I'm in the middle of loving and hating the new Blogger template design tools. At first review, the new template code looks a lot more difficult to tweak than the old code.

Not a bad way to spend a Saturday evening, right? For us this is a busy night!

Elements not line up. Must fix.

I'm tweaking the alignment of the elements on the blog, so some things might not be lining up at the moment.

While this troubles my OCD greatly, the strategically-placed post-it notes on the monitor are helping a lot. It will all be happy soon.

Twitter Element Removed

I took the Twitter feature off the top of the blog. It was sloppy, and I couldn't come up with a good way to make it less sloppy. Until I get better at code-wrangling, I'm gonna just take it down.

How weird is this?

Somehow, all of the text except for the newest post is all lower-case. Weird.

Must be something I did in the new template.

New Template!

For a few years, I was very good about blogging 5 times a week, even if the day to day stuff was short, I wanted to post something. It helped that I was allowed to blog at work, I have to admit. And by 'allowed' I mean, no one was paying attention to anything I did as long as my work was done. These carefree days are over, unfortunately.

As is likely obvious from the clunky, amateur design, I made this new template from scratch - using the book "HTML, XHTML, and CSS for Dummies". It was a fun and frustrating process that took months of work, with moments stolen here and there. I just now pasted the template code into the 'W3C Markup Validation Service' and it spit out 292 errors and 46 warnings, so apparently I still have some work to do cleaning up the code.

For the most part, it seems to work correctly - for Internet Explorer. My PC had three different browsers installed and a variety of screen resolutions to choose from - but my PC died recently.

I've been using Cindy's PC for a few months now, and all I have to work with is IE in 1024 x 768 -- and Safari on my iPhone. It looks decent on both of these, though I'm sure I'll be doing some tweaking for the next few weeks. Let me know if there's anything especially wacky happening with the blog from your point of view.

Looking at the 'Etcher Approves' links at the left, it looks as if all I do is watch TV... I need to add music and books as well.

I'm hoping the new template will get me back into blogging more often. We'll see.

Yay! Go Me!

Mike, as you know - I accidentally overwrote your blog template last night with a harshly edited version without archives, comments, or links.

I'm sorry. I know, I know, it sucks!

However, thanks to your foresight two weeks ago when you inexplicably backed up the template for no good reason, it has been restored!

Go May 11th Mike!
May 28th Mike thinks you rock the casbah! Woo!

Thanks,
Mike

New Template!

I had to upgrade to the new Blogger, and in the process I was taking a look at the other options for templates - nothing good.

I was really looking forward to an improved template - I'd had the last one for a good two years I think, but sadly the options weren't any better with the new Blogger than the old.

I ended up searching around online until I found the template you see now. It still needs work, but it's a start.