BLOG

Because I hated the new template (called a layout now) Blogger kept encouraging me to use, and which I finally tried, I have switched back to my old-fashioned, rustic, uncluttered look.

I think the deal is, unless you know your way all round HTML and CSS and are willing to manually set it up that way - in which case you likely wouldn't be using something as newbish as Blogger - then you have two options. Option one - if you had a blog prior to Google's big "upgrade" and which you put a decent amount of time into customizing (fonts, getting rid of the dumb blogger adverts in the code, widening the columns somewhat, and so on), KEEP IT in the old format. Otherwise, it will look scrunched, and all your customization will fail or be ignored or cause microscopic singularities to occur in the fabric of spacetime, probably within your own home. Try looking for your lost keys then.

If however you are starting a blog anew on Blogger, you really have no choice but to use on of their new layouts anyways, but the good news it that they will look just fine. It's not the new layouts and methods for handling things like widgets which the Blogger team has grafted onto the old simpler structure that's the problem - it's the conversion algorithm they've kludged into being which fouls up old blogs and makes them look terrible in the new scheme. They just don't translate well, don't look the same as they used to. I've a hunch the more you've messed with the official templates, the worse the translation goes; I did a lot of excision on the actual HTML in my own blog template, not wanting it to look like anyone else's, and also pretty extensively mussed about with the typographic parameters (won't go into detail here) and the sidebar (basically only leaving a customized navigation tool, which I didn't even like). So, I shouldn't have expected things to go well.

It basically killed all my fonts and formatting, leaving it almost unreadable with no leading to speak of and a miniscule x-height. Without getting technical, I decided that fixing it would have been harder than restoring the old template, which fortunately I could do. Yay, back to normal. Most of the other blogs I run use the new layout, which is fine with me. I like widgets and polls and so forth, but I think I'll keep this particular blog pristine as long as Blogger will let me. If they ever shut off the ability to use the older templates, I'll move to WordPress or Movable Type. Someplace which actually lets me create something which somewhat resembles what I have in my head, which Blogger patently does not do.