Widgeting

I started my blog back before Blogger went to the page elements layout, with the widgets, so I just did everything myself in the HTML. I was quite happy with this, but I did envy the nifty collapsible archive widget, as my own archive list got longer and longer... and longer. I tried copying just the coding for that widget into my template, but that didn't work at all. So I decided to bite the bullet and make the change, after first trying it out on a test blog to make sure I could keep everything looking the way I wanted it.

I found lots of great info at blogbulk.com. The hardest thing was figuring out how to keep my large banner centered without increasing the width of my blog. And I couldn't get it to keep my little blue brush stroke behind the "about me" part, so I took a screen shot and made the whole thing into an image. (Can you tell? It looks fine on my screen.) I also figured out how to make conditional widgets, so not everything is visible on the individual post pages.

I spent a good chunk of two days working on this. In retrospect, I should have waited till after Christmas. I do have another rather time-consuming project that I'm trying to get done before that.