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