Just gave this blog a bit of a visual and functional overhaul. Even though I started with the notion of wanting to make the actual blog column wider to be able to display 16:9 videos larger, I ended up switching over to the three column look. Not quite sure if I’ll stick with it. What do you think?
And here’s some techie stuff: To change over from 2 to 3 columns and not lose all the widgets, keywords and tracking code to Google Analytics, I needed to make changes to the actual html code of the layout (it’s based on the Rounders 2 template) and couldn’t just download & install a new template. By the way, I’m a total dork when it comes to html. I used these two sites to help me change over: The Blogger Guide and Three Column Blogger (beware the images for Rounders do not exist anymore).
With both of them I was still getting errors. One of the biggest problems was the rounded header image that has to be available somewhere online in the matching size. In the end I had to create my own header image (which gave me the opportunity to add our logo), upload it through “add page element” and then kind of blindly hack around in the html code. The header- and outer-wrapper need to match the size of the header image (in this case 990px) and then at least one margin needed to be set to 0 so the header would left-aligned with the left column (total trial & error style).
While fiddling around I also added the Google Friend Connect/Follow gadget. Not convinced about that one yet. I guess they’re trying to compete with facebook? Or just generally want to keep better tabs on us? Or maybe it’s totally awesome? Or maybe it’s supposed to make you feel sad because you don’t have many people connected to your site? But maybe it’s simply something that will show its benefits more clearly as more people utilize it… Do you use it?
Last but not least, there is the new Blogger editing interface & functionality. It’ll take some getting used to it – but I like it. Except, WAIT, where did the spell check go? Noooooo!
I like it!