A Whole New Blog Here--3 Columns

What do you think? I haven't been posting for this past week since I've been so busy developing a new template for my blog here. I have always liked the appearance of the 3-column blogs, since it allows you to place sidebar content on both sides of your postings-if you have a large amount of sidebar content in your blog. I've originally
wanted to try to adapt the Blogger Rounders template to 3-column, but there were some serious problems when viewing a 3-column Rounders template in Internet Explorer--the right hand sidebar dropped down to the bottom corner. And adjusting the margins of the sidebars is almost impossible because the Rounders templates uses gif images to round out the corners, and those images are stored on the Google servers. If Google ever creates a 3-column Rounders template, I'd certainly look into it.

So I had to search for another template. I found a 3-column Minima template off of Hackoshpere, which worked in both Firefox and IE Explorer. Then it is customization time with background, text and link colors, adding all the feeds and weblinks, and making sure everything balances out. I'm currently using Blogger Beta, which has some good points and bad points about it. I do like the new labels for postings, although I do wish I could go in and adapt and customize the labels, as you can in Daily Kos. However, Blogger Beta uses XHTML and widgets. The widgets are useful in moving sections of your blog around the page. For example, I could move the News and Information Websites section from the right sidebar to the left sidebar with a simple click of the mouse. However, I cannot edit the URLs located in this News and Information Websites widget, since the data on this widget is located on the Google servers. And if you radically change templates, you can possibly lose the data in these widgets. I've had to go through all the News, Political Blogs, and Interesting Blogs and re-enter those links in through the Google Page Layout program by hand--about three times now. And finally, since this was an extended HTML file, I couldn't do any editing of the template in my Front Page program, since my version of Front Page doesn't supportXHTML.

What fun we can have in editing templates.

On the left sidebar, I’ve placed the Blog Archive, Labels, Feed Links and advertisements. The right sidebar has my profile, News and Information Websites, Political Blogs, Interesting Blogs, a new heading named Conservative Blogs, and the Policy Institutes. I have even added some more links to Oh Well. In the News and Information section, I've added links to some international news sites. You can now access the BBC News, London Times, DerSpiegel, and Financial Times. I've also included some more regional news sites of The Dallas Morning News, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Daily News, and even the Moonie paper Washington Times. I've added Anderson Cooper's 360 blog, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Alternet, and CNet News. On the Political Blogs, you can find Brad DeLong, Buzz Flash, Carpetbagger Report, Daou Report, David Sirota, Matt Ygelsias, Progressive Blog Digest, Tom Pain's Common Sense, and YouTube. In the Interesting Blogs, I've added Alas A Blog, All SpinZone, Bitch Ph.D., Brad Blog, Crooked Timber, DC Media Girl, NTodd, Fat Cat Politics, Happy Furry Puppy Story Time (What a mouthful!), Lawyers Guns and Money, T Rex, Two Glasses, Wampum, and Whiskey Bar. And finally, I've created a new section highlighting the Conservative Blogs. I'll admit that I sometimes head over to the Conservative blogs to see what the Right Wing is talking about. If I wanted to go over and see what the conservatives were saying, I usually went through theTTLB Ecosytem, which listed the top conservative blogs that I could link to. Well, I figured it was time to link those blogs to Oh Well. So you'll find Andrew Sullivan, Captain's Quarters, Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, Drudge, Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, and Red State here--let's hope you have the stomach to enter into these sites this close to Halloween.

That's pretty much it. Hope you enjoy reading this blog. Now it is time for me to get back into the news and start posting again. Time to have some more fun here.

Eric A Hopp