ListWise

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Blog Stuff. Not House Stuff

I discovered Hackosphere from one of the other blogs (I don’t remember which) and I’ve been tweaking the blog the past few days. I think some of the new features that come with the basic Blogger Beta - or is it now the New Blogger, or maybe there is no more Old and New Blogger and it’s all just Blogger. I’m not really sure, either way, I was not thrilled with the new look of the default Blogger. That pretty much goes for most of the templates they offered. It's not that they're bad, I'm just picky, I guess. I'm still not happy with the way mine looks.

The old ones weren’t that great either but at least someone with basic HTML skills could easily hack the old templates. The new ones rely heavily on Widgets, and hacking a Widget is beyond my skill level at this point. Fortunately, others out there are skilled at hacking them and they’ve posted a bunch of stuff to allow Widget neophytes like myself to customize their blogs. I’ve decided I’m going to keep tweaking it until I’m quoted by a national news media outlet, but I promise, no more blinking text or scrolling titles.

I also feel bad because I posted a bit of a rant in the HouseBlogs.net discussion forums today. It wasn’t meant as a whiney, childish rant, but it may have come out that way. I love HouseBlogs.Net and it was only out of my frustration of not being able to use it that I posted. After I posted, the whole thing seemed to go kablooy and I hope it wasn’t my cause. Anyway Nick, I didn’t mean to rag on you. You guys over at HiP do a bang-up, and I’m sure largely thankless job of keeping HouseBlogs.Net up and running. You had mentioned the problems were a recent thing but if the truth be told, the issues I wrote about have been ongoing for me. Maybe it’s my browser. I don’t know. Regardless, I love HouseBlogs.Net, and if I haven’t said it, I’ll say now: Thanks for keeping the site up and running.

2 comments:

John said...

Timely post.

I can't view either of my blogs; I get this error message bX-vjhbsj whatever it means. I don't think it is just me, since The Emery Restoration gave me the same thing.

Then I went to Houseblogs and it asked me if I wanted to download Vanillia 1.2 or somthing of the sort.

And, in case I didn't mention it before, I greatly enjoyed your 5 Things post, particularly From Russia With Love. Wow.

kevin said...

I gave up on houseblogs.net, It really bothered me that the links that I used to follow (banners) started going to a houseblogs.net page about the blog (why do I want to look at that?) and then when I click on the blog link, it opens a new window/tab. I find it kind of tacky to work against users to keep them on the site.

I posted a comment about it somewhere not using an account, it said it would need to be approved, and it wasn't..go figure.

Now I mostly read this blog and the ones you link to directly.