Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Blog Make-over is the new Cosmetic surgery for the Poor

As an acknowledgment of the present monotony in my life I took an entire day just to change the look of my blog.

The lessons taken (once again, as this is its 2nd time since its birth) from the exercise are as follows :

1. You get to know how difficult it actually is to get your blog a "make-over". Hats off to people who endure that kind of ordeal to change their own look once in a while. And hats off to those cosmetic surgeons for their effort.

2. For a technically challenged individual like me it was a learning experience of sorts to actually change the XML/HTML codes of the template as there were lots of "trial and error" involved. One cannot afford to be complacent as the harvest of so many hours of ennui and inspiration over the last two years run the risk of getting obliterated at a single wrong click.

3. The choice for the new skin (or template as they call it) of the blog is of pivotal importance. It must preserve its previous identity while giving the general impression of a resurrected facade. And choosing a template, keeping in mind both these factors, necessitated an expedition covering 20 odd sites, 3 trials, one mistrial and finally "the eureka moment" accounting for 4 hours, 175 MB and 1 packet of Good Day biscuits in the bargain.

4. The template-switch process can gobble up your entire blog-roll and sadly the same has happened to me. The easy-to-remember/curiously named/old favourites/recently book-marked links(URLs is the more technically apt word, I learned in the process) are all that I could manage to reinstate, albeit after taxing my flagging memory for quite a while. To my other good blogger friends, whom I might have missed most regret ably amidst this confusion, I ask for some time before I can retrieve their links by means as inept as random blog-hunting. In the mean time if some of them happen to chance upon this "redone" blog of mine I would be glad to get back their links....errr.... URLs.

8 comments:

FlotsaM said...

Next time i come home, i need to know from you the entire process of this make over

vanilla sky said...

the stretched look is nice.
and the worst thing about changing to templates other than blogger's is that all the add-ons are not restored automatically

ad libber said...

see, what you should have done is kept a window of the old look of your blog open so that you could compare to see what you missed.

first thing i did was to see whether my blog was mentioned or not. yes, i am that self obsessed.

loony girl said...

and thts y i do not bother with templates! 1 basic background i has and i keep adding to it :P
but nice your blog looks now!

Whats in a name.......... said...

atleast you tried and well tried!!hats off to you!! i dont dare tread into this "make-over" territory!!all i do is justy a simple little colour change!!
p.s-glad u didnt miss my blog this time!!beams****lol

Anonymous said...

oh, i am rapidly becoming an expert in changing templates...

Antigone said...

old wine in new bottle..and the older the wine the better. ;)

ok, forget the 'older the wine' part. it has no connection really with the context.

What's In A Name ? said...

# FS - Yaa sure. You just pay for the extra 150 MB. deal ?

# VS - Thanks. Yes, that's the most irritating aspect!

# AL - Yes yes. Your URL is too queerly named.

# solo - thanks the lotz. :)

# namesake - History didn't repeat itself here. :)

# inihos - So, I see.

# antigone - Out of context ???? So very uncharacteristic of you.