Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Handcrafted.

One thing that I always like about blogger was the fact that it is infinitely customizable yet, extremely userfriendly. Though I am pretty familiar with computers and programming I am very much a neophyte to the world of web programming. Infact I guess the web has contributed more acronyms to the dictionary than anyother single field. Blogger, was pertty much an ideal beginers blog-tool with very well made templates and all that, but there are always times when you need that extra punch. Though all the templates were eye catchy and all that they lacked induviduality. Alas, they were not mine.

And none of them could come to be the template that I had always wanted, or so I thought, until I came across raymond chen's blog ( a win32 UI uber-geek ). The color scheme was amazing, the sidebar was filled with extremely useful navigational content (including a LJ style calender, etc.. ) and that was what I wanted my blog to be. So I started the process of mangling my original template and with no idea of what CSS even expanded to I set out. Also the first thing I do when I plan to pay tribute to (shamelessly rip-off) a web page is I look into page source, but unfortunately in this case the blog being hosted on MSN did not have embedded/inline style sheets. So, I couldn't get access to all the juicy formatting content that made this simple blog look like the one I always wanted.. (yeah I know its only 2 lines of python code to retrieve the stylesheet, or one line in the address bar :D ) but something inside me wanted to make this style all my own.. and so I set out to do so..

With one whole day of effort I've got this new completely handcrafted template up and running.. (I wish I could get rid of the dirty blogger bar, but guess I can't ). And I like the result!

Happily signing off,
Vishnu Vyas

2 comments:

shakuni said...

Removing the Blogger bar is one of the easier things kiddo. try this http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2005/01/remove-navbar.html

FuzzyLogic. said...

hey thanks for the tip da. I finally did it.

btw, "Web Best Practices" and all that demands that you use their 2nd tip rather than the first one.. and there is an advantage with the 2nd one, because it doesn't exactly get rid of the bar, it just makes it invisible, so you can still get the traffic that the nav bar gives, without actually having the nav bar :D