Saturday, September 02, 2006

A New Beginning

Guess what?! I've decided to take the plunge and convert this blog over to Blogger Beta! Yups! I had just signed in to my account yesterday when I noticed that Blogger had wonderfully gave me the link to convert over! That's just great! I was afraid of compatibility issues at first, but after about 2 hours of tinkering with the new format, I realised that if your blogger template isn't one that is highly customised, then the change over is pretty painless! In fact, my guess is taht you will probably end up spending more time playing with the new options and trying to customise your blog with the new options!

As for this blog, I have decided to use one of the standard templates as a base for now. Somehow, it looks neater and more organised. However that also means no customised header and the return of the annoying blogger bar at the top. Besides that though, everything seems to fit right in. Just a note to those who are going through previous entries though: My previous background colour was black, so the words were sometimes in white. That means, if you happen to come across some posts with a big chunk of emptiness, it's because the words have simply faded into the white background. Click and drag your cursor over and you will be able to read them.
I am in the midst of thinking through and finding out how to build my own template from scratch. That means, learning about flash, css files and improving my somewhat limited understanding of html. By then, blogger should have already completed their support for raw html editing of blog templates in Blogger Beta.

For now, I will try to write about my experiences in building up the previous blog. My aim when I started this blog was to take advantage of all the free plugins and 3rd party programs out there to create a blog that was fun, creative, customisable, interactive and unexpected. I have not paid a single cent except for my Flickr pro account which I thought was extremely value for money. Much of my experiments and discoveries so far have been in the area of displaying photos, screening shows and playing music, so these are probably what I can share with you all. Hopefully, it will help those trying to start their own blogs and lessen the learning curve for you. If you have been blogging for a while already, you might just find something that interests you too! For starters, here are 2 tutorials that will help in your conversion to Blogger Beta. Enjoy. :)

HOW TO ADD CATEGORIES TO YOUR OLD TEMPLATE

HOW TO HIDE/REMOVE NAVBAR AND ADD SEARCH BOX

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