The blogging platform I use is Blogger.com. Over the last couple of months, they have come out with a new Template Designer tool and some new templates that allow bloggers to tailor the look of their blogs. So I thought I would ditch the old boring template I had been using and, in the words of George Costanza, just do the opposite.
So I have moved from a lighter neutral color style to a darker style. The template I am using is called Awesome Inc. The new Template Designer is quite nice and is worlds better than the old one that Blogger.com had been featuring.
- It made it hard to to read the text of the posts. My writings are difficult enough to digest without introducing additional burdens on my dozen or so readers.
- I also had to do unnatural acts in the CSS and HTML of the template to get things to look decent under Internet Explorer 6, which doesn’t support PNG transparency.
Too much of a hassle, so Copper Dust bit the dust.
For actually composing the content of my blog, I have moved on to a tool from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer. I find this tool more pleasing to use than the default post editor that Blogger.com uses. I always struggled like hell to get paragraph breaks to behave consistently in the post editor from Blogger.com – you have may have noticed that in some of my posts. WLW has a nice plug-in architecture where third-party developers can augment the base functions in WLW with additional custom functions. So there are a better selection of plug-ins for adding video, audio, and pictures to the blog. Two thumbs up for this tool.
