The Over(due)haul

I had been trying in vein to move my blogger template to the new version for the past 1 year or so. But, with little or no satisfying outcome. I had taken enormous pains to move it to the K2 template (by Gecko and Fly), shown below. That was somewhere in the first half of 2007. Few months following that make over I gave to my blogger template, I came to know of the layout view, which enabled simple adding of widgets or gadgets from the template in the blogger dashboard itself. I was stuck with the K2 classic template and did not have the time nor the energy to once again spend over a day or more for another blogger template update. I continued with the classic K2 template.

I had made more than a couple of painful attempts at the template upgrade for my blog in early 2009. The idea of incorporating my wishful contents, in an as yet non-envisioned layout was made more challenging by the overwhelming task of tweaking the code all by myself. Finally, in November 2009, I sat down and summoned up enough courage and time to do the unthinkable.I zeroed in on the Minyx template, which I liked for the simplistic feel to it, yet having a jazzy look. I also was looking for something which remotely aligned with my thoughts of a Green template. The obvious (if not yet) reason was my love for nature and it's conservation. The other unique aspect, which I now am proud of, is the amount of real estate I have been able to achieve with the Minyx template. Following is a snapshot of the Minyx template, if it would have been, had I not made any template modifications of my own.

I soon realised that, only the one who has envisioned or is still envisioning a design can be satisfied about having modified a layout. My blogger template layout as it stands today, has undergone innumerable code changes and tiny tweaks inside the xml code. The inspiration has been Minyx. But what has been the outcome over more than 50 hours of tweaking effort, is due to all the references which you can find as a scrolling list under - Revered References on the bottom right corner. The tips and tricks I chose and incorporated from these references is endless. Starting from justifying the text content, to creating a right column and a left column inside the sidebar has been contributed by these referencing sites.

I had hesitated and was skeptical of including Google Ads on my blog, because of it impeding the simplistic design which I wanted to maintain. However, with so much of real estate on my layout, I mustered enough will power to incorporate as many Google Ads as possible. I learnt an important lesson during my more than 50 hour effort of blogger template overhaul. If you own a blog and hold it close to your heart, you and only you can design it closest to your satisfaction. If you hold it that close to your heart, no piece of code can be overwhelming.