The Real Blogger Status

The new Designer Templates were released over a month ago , and still not everybody knows how to access them. Almost daily, we see the plaintive query Where in my Blogger settings can I access the new Blogger template designer? and to be sure, it seemed, at one time, a bit tricky. (Update 2010/06/10): The Template Designer is now a production Blogger feature . The Template Designer is now part of Production (Orange) Blogger, and is accessible from the dashboard "Template" page - or the navbar "Design" link. If you click on "Design" from the navbar, you get the "Template" page, where you find the "Customize" button. There it is - "Template Designer". Just login to Blogger , click on "Template", and hit the "Customize" button. You can't miss it.

After months of waiting, Blogger today released their new template library. Instead of a static library, though, they chose to provide an array of combinable choices . Multiple, exciting styles. A huge library of theme organised backgrounds, each with an associated colour palette. A selection of layouts, with symmetrical combinations of 2, 3, and 4 columns with and without split sidebars in both left and right variations Adjustable column widths. An updated Fonts and Colors GUI interface , with selections for new template objects like Pages Index gadgets. From the dashboard or navbar , select "Design". From " Page Elements ", then select "Template Designer" - and check out the possibilities. What we have, now, is an almost infinite variety of possibilities , which should keep many bloggers happily occupied for days. If the Template Designer for your blog lacks options, you can even add some wizards to the Designer menu . As with every new ...

With a blog that uses a Layouts template, the key blog maintenance wizards, like "Create Post". "Edit HTML". "Edit Post". "Page Elements". "Pick New Template". and others are all related. The blog template contains meta code that makes some of these wizards work. If we mess up the template, some of these wizards may not work anymore. Then, we say simply that we have a "corrupted template" . What now? Can we recover from a "corrupted template"?

Since New Blogger, and the Pick New Template wizard, was launched, many bloggers have been wishing for a 3 column template. So far, Blogger hasn't provided us with one, so a while ago, I got ambitious, and made my own. You can see the basic result, in my 3 Column Template Laboratory , and in my previous article, Making A 3 Column Template .

Making a 3 column template is not as difficult as many bloggers would lead you to believe. I don't recommend this as a cookbook exercise, though - you have to understand what you're doing. It's simply not too hard to understand, when you look at it closer.

Ever since I followed the pack, and experimented with making myself a 3 column template (and discovered how deceptively easy that was), I've been considering making a 3 column stretch template. I have enjoyed my 2 column stretch template so much, that I sort of suspected that a 3 column stretch template wouldn't be a great stretch (pun intended) of effort.

New Blogger - what I will call here "New Blogger 2006" - has been with us now for one year , give or take a few months. This time last year, I had just previously written about the impending migration to Blogger Beta (aka "New Blogger 2006"). Now, we are completing the migration. I say "completing the migration" because there are, currently, folks seeking guidance on how to complete the migration of their blogs. All blogs are now under New Blogger - that's not the issue - Old Blogger was laid to rest some months ago. Not all blogs are using Layouts templates, however. Some blogs, which are published using FTP to external servers, will always be using Classic templates. Yet there are some blogs which can be migrated to Layouts, that haven't. Anybody who has been posting, or helping, in any of the Blogger Help Group forums has seen this query. I just finished entering a post into my blog. I previewed it - and it looked fine. Then I publishe...

Since New Blogger, and the Pick New Template wizard, was launched, many bloggers have been wishing for a 3 column template. So far, Blogger hasn't provided us with one. There are several web sites that offer templates, and some 3 column templates, but using a third party template isn't always a great solution . Fortunately, making a 3 column template from a 2 column template isn't all that hard to do, assuming that your blog doesn't use fixed width components as Rounders, Scribe, Son Of Moto, Thisaway, and TicTac templates do. You can still make 3 column displays with those templates, but they won't look as good. A 2 column template has 2 columns, floating opposite each other. Main, floating left. Sidebar, floating right. All that you have to do is split the Main column. Main1, floating left. Sidebar2, floating left. Main2, floating right. Sidebar1, floating right. A 2 column lefty template is just a mirror. Sidebar, floating left. Main, floating right. Again, sp...

Every week or so, someone writes I do not understand why Blogger tells me that I cannot change my layout using the GUI template wizard (add gadgets, use Labels fully, have the "Next Post" / "Previous Post" links, restrict blog access, ...), simply because my blog is not hosted on a Google server. Why do FTP published blogs get second class treatment? with the implication being that Blogger is shortchanging FTP published blogs , to coerce their owners into publishing on a Google server, either to Blog*Spot, or to a Custom Domain. The answer here is a bit simpler. You can't use a Layouts template, or the GUI features, because a Layouts template is written in dynamic HTML. Dynamic HTML requires that the server with the blog content (ie Blogger) be accessed by the blog reader, as the blog is being read. When you publish by FTP, to a server distant from Blogger, you are publishing statically. The publishing process sets up the blog on the distant server once,...

Since migrating to New Blogger, various Bloggers have been lamenting the lack of 3 column templates . Many efforts - such as long threads in some forums - have sprung up, discussing the oversight. Eventually, hacked versions, of the standard Blogger templates, were made available by various template providers. The hacked templates, nice though they are, have several shortcomings. You can't load them using the "Pick New Template" wizard in Templates. When you do load them, you may lose your custom widgets. Blogger doesn't support them. Since Blogger doesn't support the third party products, when Blogger makes changes, it's doubtful that they test any changes against blogs that use them. And the Bloggers using them will occasionally experience problems. In one case, the problem was related to the server hosting the blog components; the template in question was apparently a victim of its popularity, which caused the creators bandwidth limits to be exceeded. T...

Replacing the boring text title in your blog is easy enough. Making it look really pretty is easy - when you know how. Removing the header element in a New Blogger (2007) blog is not too hard. Replacing the template entry , or adding a new header page element , isn't terribly difficult. But some templates require just a bit more work. if you want to do a good job. I started out with a plain text header, the default for Minima, in a pair of ugly boxes. I replaced the default blog header with an HTML page element . <a href="http://bloggerstatusforrealbeta.blogspot.com/index.html"><img border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/560/527000594325287/ 1600/RBS%20Header%201.gif"/></a> <p align="center">What Blogger won't tell you.</p> The graphic content is nicer, but still the ugly boxes. I then had to edit the template HTML. I found the code for the Blog Title. <div id="header"> <a...

Earlier, I wrote about how to Restore The Main Page Link To The Title , in a New Blogger (2007) blog. That was a hack, and a messy one at that. Blogger fixed that little omission, so it's no longer necessary. The blog title is now clickable, and links back to main page view - in a blog with default setup - just as it did for a Classic blog. But it's still boring text - a title, followed by a description. So some will ask How do I customise my blog header? How do I (for instance) replace the boring text title with a picture? You have several choices here. The easiest , and probably the most popular, will be to use the "Configure Header" wizard in Page Elements . The least popular will be as you would in a Classic blog , to edit the template HTML. The choice with the most possibilities will be to use the GUI Page Layout editor, and replace the standard blog header with a hand created HTML / JavaScript gadget . Go into Template - Page Elements. Edit the Blog Heade...