Third Party Templates, Again

This week, a few bloggers are complaining about their blogs having lost formatting.

For some reason my blog is only showing up as text and pictures I posted- the whole template is gone and it's just black text on a white background.

This blog, like the others, is using a GoogleLite template.

When you use a standard Blogger template, you include it statically in your blog, and you use the Template wizards to select your template. Many people, who use GoogleLite templates, include theirs dynamically.

<style type="text/css">
@import url('http://googlelite.free.fr/stevenson.css');

This is a kewl idea. Why have a plain old static template, which never changes? Why not use something fresh, that changes periodically, without me having to do anything?

Well, this week is one example why this isn't a good idea. Apparently, GoogleLite has stopped serving some templates from their servers. Bloggers who have their blogs using their templates, dynamically, are finding their blogs becoming flat and plain, and ugly.

So if your blog has suddenly become flat, plain, and ugly, and you're using a GoogleLite template, that is why you're here.

In other cases, people who provide free templates become their own worst enemy - so many people loading the templates - the hosts that serve the templates run out of bandwidth.

There's a frog on my blog.

We've heard that complaint a few times, and it generally refers to the PhotoBucket icon that is captioned

Bandwidth Exceeded.

When you provide free templates to the public, you serve components in the templates using free image servers like PhotoBucket, and you get lots of "customers", eventually your customers will make PhotoBucket say

Enough!

and display a frog where your template should be.

Free templates are great - but they have their limits.

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