Monday, January 01, 2007

Beginning new year with a new blog design

Today I have updated the design of this blog to the new "Google-style" design. It looks similar to the old design, except for some small details. The option to upgrade the blog to a new design was available there for several months, and a new year is a good time to begin with a new design.


After update, an additional RSS link has been added ( http://dominounlimited.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default ) , but luckily the old Atom RSS link (http://dominounlimited.blogspot.com/atom.xml ) seems to be still valid.


So far I found a couple of small disadvantages with the new design.
One of them is that links to configure the sections in the navigation panel are always shown for all visitors and when a visitor clicks on them, a popup with login screen is shown. Those links are for blog's owner only and has no use for other people. I would prefer not to have those links at all and do all design modifications from the blog's maintenance page. Maybe I've just missed some setting to hide those links.
One more irretating thing is that HTML editor for richtext (in blog posts) adds many unneccessary DIV tags.

Old posts for the last month were of course automatically re-saved during the update and are shown in the RSS readers as new posts.


The biggest maintenance difference to the old blog is probably a new way to manage the right-side navigation pane. With the new design, it's possible to manage the sections without having to write HTML code, which was the only way in the original Blogger template. See the picture below:




Using a customisable HTML section, I've added STWidget chat widget below the "About me" section in the right navigation panel.

Maybe one day I'll update to a Domino-based blog to be able to make advanced customisations and add cool functions, but so far I am satisfied with the Blogger blog :)

Should you update your old Blogger blog to the new Google design? Well, if you want a larger control over the right navigation panel you might consider doing it, otherwise there are no huge advantages with it.

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