The template in use across my blog has served me well for several months, but it still doesn't have the feel I would really like. I started with a standard template then upgraded to a template downloaded from BloggerBuster. BloggerBuster is a good place to start reading about templates design as well.
Amanda Fazani is great. Her templates work reliably and my next step from the standard templates was one written by Amanda. I'd recommend that anybody who wants more choice than the Blogger templates but isn't up to customising templates themselves uses one from Amanda - they are listed on BloggerBuster.
Next updated to a third party template from elsewhere and it looked gorgeous - but was absolutely full of bugs. I abandoned it. Fixing somebody else's template is an uphill struggle. I then opted for CleanDark from BloggerTricks which formed the basis of the template in use as I write this post (August 2009). Again it was full of bugs, but not so many that I couldn't fix them. I've tried other templates from BloggerTricks and there are issues with most if not all of them. But many third party templates are much worse. I found another one I liked earlier this week but it reports errors even on the demo site.
Not all third party templates are broken. I've found one called showcase that so far seems to be 100% reliable. People have reported errors with it - but the author has fixed them and republished. That's something to look for. Too many template authors are publish and forget. With care, and a lot of testing, there are some good templates out there but many look good but are going to be grief in practice.
I've reached the stage at which no third party template is ever going to give me exactly what I want, even if I find one without too many bugs. I tried writing one six months ago and struggled - my CSS wasn't good enough. Six months on Squido has fixed that. I wrote the bare bones of one yesterday and I'm now happy I can manage the CSS and the Blogger variables. I didn't like the design though, so I'm starting from scratch. Back to a basic template and add everything I want manually. That really is quicker than trying to customise a template from somebody else.
The standard Blogger recent comments widget doesn't include the title of the original post which makes it fairly rubbish. There are a number of alternatives out there, but few address this key deficiency. One which does is one I found at Review of Web. The source code is included there so that you can embed it into a Javascript widget in your sidebar. Getting it working takes no more than a couple of minutes. Great, just what I wanted!
Type the address of you blog into the box, for instance http://how2zilla.blogspot.com for this blog, Obviously use the URL of your own blog. When you click on Next, you'll probably then get a screen like this:
Just click Next which will take you to this screen.
This is the important one so make sure it's exactly what you want. I prefer my Feed Title to be the same as the Title of my blog so I made sure Blogger had a capital letter. I also shortened the name of the feed (so it will be http://feeds2.feedburner.com/How2zilla). It doesn't really matter as most people will subscribe by clicking on a link to the feed rather than typing in the address, but a sharp address will help people to see what they are subscribing too and make it easier for you when you do need to type it in to various configuration options.
Click on Next and you are done - so long as the address you have chosen doesn't already exist: if it us already in use you'll be asked to try again. Click Next a second time to a screen headed "Get More Gusto From Your Feed Traffic Statistics." Personally I prefer to leave these options unselected. Firstly I want to leave links pointing directly to my blog for SEO purposes, but also unless you have a high volume of readers the more detailed statistics are neither very relevant nor useful.
Click Next one final time.
The feed is now set up and ready. In the next article I'll look at how to get people to use it rather than the default Blogger feed.
© Kate Phizackerley 2009
One thing I like on my blogs is a customised newsfeed from other blogs. You can see an example on my Valley of the Kings blog where I pull in news from other Egytology blogs but filter them for News relating to the Valley of the Kings.
The secret is to pass the feed through Yahoo Pipes. My pipe is here.
To edit it for your own needs, sign up for Yahoo Pipes then clone my pipe. Edit the source of your new pipe. I wrote about the method in this article on my Kate Phizackerley on General Business Administration blog.
The reason I like this is that it provides relevant content on my site for visitors to keep them coming back. They could read it on the original blog, but if that blog has articles on topics which don't interest them, or is cluttered, they'll read it on my blog. For instance I'll probably add feeds to this blog when I get chance with articles just on customising blogs.
So where do you start if you want to create your own Blogger template? The best guide I have found is this guide by Amanda Fazani. It helpfully includes a stripped down template which you can load as a sound foundation for adding your own design.
There comes a point when none of the standard Blogger templates is good enough. The next step is to move upwards to some of the excellent free templates designed by Amanda Fazani of BloggerBuster fame.
I've now outgrown those: I know exactly what I want and I'm going to have to produce it myself by customising my Blogger template. I sort of got forced into it anyway. I move my main blogs onto a third party template where I liked the design but then discovered all the bugs. So I ended up having to amend the template to fix things. I've got most of them ironed out, and I'll use that template on this blog to start with, but I've embarked on building a template from scratch. The first one(s) won't actually be used for this blog as I've another project in mind first.
So I've started this blog to share my journey on how I've customised Blogger to build the templates I want. It won't be a complete set of articles covering everything. At this time I am not blogging for money so I'm not looking at how to add Adsense to blogs for instance. Instead, it's a set of the tips I have found useful.
Kate Phizackerley
