Okay. That's it. I'm officially bored of my template. This bog-standard (blog-standard?) look suited my purposes in 2006, and I've tinkered the code throughout 2007/08 to make it look more unique (the "Read Me" hack, the star-ratings, sidebar gadgets, and whatnot). But, whatever I do, it's still essentially a common and fairly basic Blogger skin.
I think DMD needs and deserves a new coat of paint, don't you? When you realize a leopard you bought can't change its spots, you go out and buy a tiger. Or something.
So, this week I've been hammering away on DMDiD (and not only because I love acronyms). DMiD stands for "Dan's Media Digest In Draft"; it's a blog I made to tinker with a brand new template, in the hope of producing something worthwhile and "Web 2.0"-ish. Goodies like: having 3 columns, a bigger banner at the top, a wider column for posts, a handy list of recent user comments, and suchlike.
It's going quite well, actually -- although the template I've settled on has issues handling Javascript (so my Amazon-related code doesn't seem to work -- but then it sometimes does in Internet Explorer, oddly). It's all very confusing and involves XML incompatibilities, but I won't bore you with that here. I'd love to get my new template working 100% correctly on every web-browser available, but I'd rather lose the Amazon-linked stuff if it's going to cause problems.
Anyway, I just thought I'd let you know that BIG changes are afoot, so keep watching. I would really appreciate anyone's help with these changes, too. If you're a fellow blogger who's suffered template-related problems, do you have any pearls of wisdom? Are there any code-jockeys who would be willing to take a look at my HTML? That's not a euphemism, by the way.
I'd also like to extend an invite to DMD "regulars" to take a look at DMDiD first-hand and give me their thoughts. Off the top of my head, those blessed few are: Matt, Jozziah, Aaron, MediumRob and Revs. If any of you guys want to help me out, just comments below and I'll e-mail you DMDiD's web address. Obviously, please ensure your profile has an e-mail link. If not, phonetically spell it out for me to message you back.
For other readers and lurkers, if you have a suggestion (something you'd like to see on DMD, or get rid of), your comments are also very welcome. And if NOBODY gets back to me on this, well... I'll persevere anyway and we'll all be stuck with whatever I regurgitate. So don't come crying to me when I decide on a mauve/cyan combo with red lettering :)
