I've been hunting around for some time trying to find a good new layout for my blog.I'm not being picky, it's just that most of what's out there just didn't really ever do it for me.
Regular readers might recall that I originally set this one up on Blogger using their 'Son Of Moto' template, which just happened to be the kind of tasteful green that I was after.
And Green has some tradition - Dikkii's Diatribe was green to begin with.Blogger don't add terribly much in the way of templates very often, so I had to make do with what I had. The problem was, however, that all the bits that I kept adding to the blog meant that it was starting to look very busy.
So earlier in the year, I adopted a new temporary template, hoping that this might alleviate some of the busy-ness. It didn't.
But at that time, I was already searching for a new template that I could make work.
Fruitless and annoying bloody exercise that it was, I eventually found something at Blogger Buster, a great blog maintained by Amanda Fazani, who bills herself as a "full-time mum and blogger".
Great work, Amanda.
This is a template that she has called 'Sunset'.
Pretty good, hey? The code is available here.So while this looks good and all, it wasn't the thing I needed.
So I had to do some modifications.
First up was to change the background colour to green. Hey, Dikkii's Diatribe is green, OK?
Then the photo had to go. I found a pretty good graphic that I've been using at MySpace - so I already knew that it would go well with the colour.
The sidebar colour is hard-coded as black. So I changed that to match my background colour. This left two graphics that I no longer needed, so I got rid of them. Also, there were some peculiar borders that I didn't like. But for some reason, they only show up in Blogger's 'Fonts and Colors' editor. This is good.
Then, I changed the colour of all the fonts. This was messy and disgusting, and I'm not altogether happy with the results.
After this, I increased the size of the sidebars to fit a bit more in.
At this point, I saved the code. I call it 'Splat'. You can download it here - it's pretty basic.
In order to get this up to a point where I could use it, I had to make some minor alterations from here. For some reason, I couldn't get my corporate logo at the top of the blog page to display properly, so I had to hard-code the dimensions for the graphic.
Lastly, there was some messy stuffing around with code before I had all my widgets working again.
But if truth be told, now I have it all under control, I rather like it.
What do you think?
