The Template Designer

Blogger has developed another very exciting feature called the Template Designer. With it, you can create custom template designs using an extremely user-friendly interface without having to worry about meddling with HTML code! Yes, that's right, you don't have to go through the Layout -> Edit HTML interface to get another sidebar to your template, or to add a nice background image to your blog or to do many more template tweaks.

This feature is still not released formerly and is now in testing stage in Blogger in Draft. If you log in to draft.blogger.com, and go to the Layout section of your blog, you will see a new sub section called the Template Designer. (see figure below)


From that interface, you get to choose from a set of expert designed templates, manipulate the column layouts with a snap, apply many different background images and also customize the fonts and colors. You get a real-time preview as well, making it easier to experiment.

Go on and try it at Blogger in Draft and I'm sure you will love it!

Note:
Even if you have applied any customizations such as three-columns or wider-blogs from The Blogger Guide tutorials, the Template Designer will still work. It will recognize that the template is customized, but still its changes will work.

Over 100,000 Visits!

The Blogger Guide passed another milestone today; the unique visits count crossed the one hundred thousand mark!

It's just over two years since the inception, and given the relatively little amount of time I put in, this is a great achievement for me. It's been a slow but steady growth.

Thanks for all the help in spreading the word about The Blogger Guide.

Blogazines

The blogosphere is evolving! This post is about one such evolution which I happened to stumble upon today.

Most of today's blogs are of a traditional columnar layout with one main (or post) column and one or more sidebars. This layout is what you get in pretty much every post. However, the print industry, especially the magazines, have been making good use of the basic design principles such as balance, color and fonts, to add variety to individual articles.

Some very creative bloggers out there have drawn upon this idea of varied article layouts, on to the blog posts and the result is termed blogazines. Read more about this at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/ and also some tips for creative blog post design at http://line25.com/articles/tips-for-designing-unique-and-attractive-blog-posts.

This is definitely not for the average blogger as it requires lot of design skills and also effort to finish each article layout from scratch. However, I found the idea very interesting and thought you would like it too.