And so I decided to pimp my blog..

Regular readers of this blog (of which there are few, as Sitemeter depressingly informs me) will notice the fresh new look to the blog. Gone is the generic blogger-provided template and in its place is the new graphic header and color scheme.

The picture in the header is of my favorite chairs in our backyard on the hillside about 1000 feet above the city of Boulder. These chairs also form a sort of jungle-gym for the family of foxes that summers in our backyard each season. My recent post In appreciation of mothers everywhere about the foxes, features a picture of Flicka, one of the little fox kits, under one of the chairs.

The chairs are at about 6200 feet above sea-level and that's where I like to sit during the summer months and think big thoughts over a reassuring beer or two. It somehow seemed fitting that a blog about random thoughts should feature the chairs where much of such random thinking is done, at least when the weather allows.

While conceiving the graphic and the color scheme took some thinking, it was by no means the most difficult part of the exercise. Having found the picture I wanted to use, resizing it for use as a banner header was easy with Photoshop.

Editing the blogger template was another matter entirely. I first started by selecting a simple template and importing the HTML code it into an HTML editor - I used Nvu - so that I could make edits in a user-friendly WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) mode. While I am familiar with HTML and its use in websites, I had never edited HTML code before and thought having an HTML editor like Nvu would be much easier than editing raw HTML in a text editor like Wordpad or Notepad. I had not bargained on the further complexity of working with style sheets which control the way everything is represented on the site, independant of the content.

After a weekend of struggling with Nvu, it became obvious that while I was able to make the changes I wanted within Nvu, getting those changes to reflect in the blog when seen through the browser was something else entirely. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the tags to show the actual content of the site, and frustratingly, only the tags showed.

Eventually, out of despair, I painstakingly went through each line of HTML code in the template, made changes where I needed and arrived at the look that you see before you. I am reasonably pleased with the changes I have wrought, and I hope you will be too. Feel free to add a comment to let me know what you think about the new look.

The really interesting experiment will be to see if the new design has any effect on the vast readership I enjoy.

Blogger Template, Nvu, HTML editing, Custom Template, PhotoShop