It took me several days of coding and tweaking, but I finally completed creating a new skin for my blogger blog (http://EnvironmentalChemistry.blogspot.com) so that my blog looks like my main environmental chemistry site. That was really challenging. I'll probably never get it to validate to W3C specifications, but it does display correctly in Firefox, Opera, IE6 & IE7, so I figure I'm pretty safe.
Overall the new Blogger development tools are pretty cool, but I would have liked more control over some things. Better documentation would have been really helpful.
If anyone is going to attempt to build their own skin for Blogger, I would really advise to make sure that you have upgraded your templates to the new Blogger first. Yes you will lose your old modifications but working with the new template design tools is really critical.
Oh one really cool (if overloaded) design feature I have in my site is my JavaScript based horizontal drop down menu. This gives me the ability to provide a common menuing system between my main site, my blog and partner sites that can be updated from one point. What is really cool is that even though it is a JavaScript based script, I programmed it to pull the last eight blog posts via RSS and add them to my Blog drop down menu. Thru some really careful coding I was able to get this menu down to just over 8kb (when transmitted as GZip) even though it has around 500 links so despite its comprehensive nature the menu adds very little extra overhead to the download requirement for my site. Basically the idea for the menu was to be a universally accessible site map that only got loaded once per visit. Of course I still use a traditional HTML linking structure via a vertical menu on pages for SEs and non-JavaScript users.
Bookmarks