Sunday, November 11, 2007

Migrating from Blogger Classic Templates over to Layouts

Since the upgrade to Blogger last year I’ve stuck with the Classic Templates rather than downgrading to the new-fangled Layouts. But tonight I finally decided to bite the bullet and set up a parallel blog using a couple of recent entries using Layouts to see just how bad it would be to swap across.

The answer is that it’ll be time-consuming (reckon a couple more hours on top of the two hours I’ve spent tonight experimenting tonight while watching Waterloo Road and Heroes). There are some pros and cons:

  • It does make it easy to add a background image to the blog banner ... though figuring out that 710x118 is the optimum size took a bit of guesswork!
  • The automatic Link List elements are ok, but they a bit basic and don’t allow adding images to the links (eg, Blog Feed Atom feed for alaninbelfast.blogspot.com) or having two URLs in the one entry (eg, Letter to America and Film Talk)
  • But if I ignore the Link List element and use the HTML/JavaScript element instead, I can pretty much cut and paste portions of the existing template into the new layout without extra grunt work.
  • There’s no Recent Comments page element. But the last five comments can be extracted by pointing the Feed element to yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default, ticking item dates and sources/authors. Unfortunately, it’s limited to the last 5 items – and can’t even be changed by hacking the HTML (which would probably also break the automatic template).

I’ve always been fond of the Rounders layout. But if I go ahead and migrate from Classic Template -> Layout I could quickly become a fan of Denim (or even Stretched Denim that uses the full width of your browser window).

So if you notice a few weirdnesses in AiB over the next day or two, please empathise with my pain!

Update: It took about an hour in the end. Now to get a good image for the banner.

1 comment:

David Todd said...

Alan, have some fun and go over to 'https://draft.blogger.com/draft' and add a few Google gadgets to AIB.