Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal.

When I go from hence
let this be my parting word,
that what I have seen is unsurpassable.

Saturday 5 July 2008

Designing the blog - II

Continuation of Designing the blog

I spent last evening exploring ways to give the blog a more profesional look. I have already done all that can be done within the Blogger framework. Now I want to go beyond that. I discovered two important sources of information. The first is from Blogger itself. Its called Blogger in Draft. Its the place where where Google lets users test out widgets and tools that might not be ready for widespread use. To access it, log into draft.blogger.com instead of http://www.blogger.com/. You may find options for new page elements that have not appeared in the regular dashboard yet. I got the search widget from there. It is a very useful addition as it allows me to search for any keyword in all posts in my archive so that I do not have to go and search manually. It takes an awful lot of time to load though. I am still not sure that I want to keep it. Thankfully, the rest of the blog loads without problems. the second source is a treasure trove of tips and tricks. This place is called Download Squad. Its a team blog and this post talks about enhancing blogger blogs. It also has links to other resources for enhancing the blogger experience. I have made quite a few changes mentioned there. My favourite is the Tag Cloud in the side bar. I have wanted it for sometime now. Another, change is that the Blogger navigation bar is no longer there. My blog is entirely my own now. Except the domain. I will have to change that soon.

What I really want is a tabbed layout. I found a few hacks which claim to enable that. I am not entirely satisfied with any of them. Guess I will have to implement one myself. Till then I will have to stick to the current layout.

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