Customizing Blogger/Blogspot - Introduction & Visualizing

Tonnes of blogs look the same. At time of writing, even this blog suffers from the "all-look-same" problem that comes with choosing from a small set of templates. I want to personalize the look of my blog and I'd love to take you along for the journey so you can do it too.

Recently, I've been experimenting with several different blog engines for my church's use. Along the way, I noticed that Blogger (or Blogspot), is now offering a very flexible way to customize said look & feel.

So from a visual perspective, here's what our blog looks like now (left) and my vision of how I want it to look like (right):


Therein lies the first step to customizing. Have a vision for how you would like your blog to look like. Design a layout you like respecting the fact that you still must have an area for blog posts and an area for widgets. Feel free to draw inspiration from other sites. Take a peek inside my thought process:

• The blog area is way too narrow - I'd like to widen it. I don't want to use the full width of the page because I like the look of "side curtains". So maybe I could expand the content panel from 765 pixels to 1000 pixels and give most of that room to the blog posts.
• My wife likes blue. A litte bit of a cold colour but tranquil. I think I will use different shades of blue for my site. And I'll use black for the side curtains - makes the page "pop" more.
  
• I'd like to have a big banner photo at the top of the page. If only I had some photography skills like Lloyd at Night & Day or Laura Hana, I could take my own photo. Oooh! found a nice free stock photo at Stock Exchange. And it's mainly blue which goes well with my colour scheme.
• Hmm, I think a 2 column layout like the way I have it now is ok. I still want all the posts to be on the left and all the widgets on the right.
• Right, now let me mock this up on Corel Photo-Paint (or CorelDraw, or Adobe Illustrator, or Adobe Photoshop, or whatever design tools you prefer). I grew up on Photo-Paint so I'm sticking with what's familiar.
• Oh yes, I'd like to get rid of that navigation bar/tool bar, if possible.
  

So go ahead and try it. If you like, post your designs somewhere (flickr, picasa, etc..) and share it with us.

Fix for the BOB Revolution stroller slouching problem

We just got a BOB Revolution stroller off craigslist and it's a great stroller - lightweight and very agile. We read reviews on this stroller prior to getting it so we knew that along with its strenghts, there is a slouching problem when babies are sat in the upright position in this stroller.

We have a 6-month old son and when he sits in the BOB, sure enough, he slouches. The problem is that the seat back is made of a pretty soft material. The red strap that is supposed to support the mid back is up near his shoulders. Hence, his back sags into the seat causing the slouch.

The fix is to place another strap around the lower back of the seat to provide a lumbar support. See the first photo. I added the black strap that goes below the red strap. You can buy any luggage strap that's long enough.

The tricky part is to loop the strap to the chassis in such a way that it doesn't impede the collapse mechanism of the stroller. See the 2nd photo. Notice how the straps loop outside the hydraulic arm and onto the chassis.

Try it out and let me know how if you find this fix helpful.

Back Up Your Files

I've seen one too many dead hard drives lately and every time someone loses some really important data. So if you haven't had this happen to you yet, I seriously urge you to *please* backup your data. And by backing up, I don't mean copying it to your flash drive/external hard drive and erasing it off your computer. Your flash drive/external hard drive are just as likely to malfunction as the drive on your computer (some may argue that they are more likely to malfunction).

How do I backup my data?

There are a few good options you can choose from.

• External hard drive backup solution - some come with backup software that makes it easy for you to pre-configure which folders/files you want to back up and it does so automatically. If you find one that has RAID functionality, I highly recommend that. RAID allows you to mirror your data on 2 drives. Trust me, the data is worth more than the drives so it's worth it for the added peace of mind. Pros: backups are relatively fast. Cons: if your house burns down, your external hard drive typically burns down with it.
• Online backup solution - there are many online backup solutions available on the market. The one I use is mozy.com and it's pretty easy to use and fairly inexpensive. With this service, your files are typically encrypted and then sent to a data center with proper equipment to keep your data safe. Pros: even if your house burns down, your data is still safe. Cons: typically slow to back up your data as you have to send info over the internet to a data center.

If you choose neither of the above, then at the very least, please make sure your computer is configured to do RAID mirroring.