Blog Themes

You've been styling your blog with a theme you like. Hopefully, your theme is starting to "fit" with your blog topic. Hopefully, you're also adding new page elements to your blog and making some use of Blogger's "gadget" options. Now it's time to tell us what you're attempting here.

I'll go first. I took the minimal theme and went with black background and that bright orange color because I'm drawing on the logo for the primetime drama Criminal Minds. I styled the course website theme with that logo in mind, and named the style "Dr. Reid" as a clear gesture of acknowledgment. Consistency told me to run with it on the course blog.

The Label Cloud page element is something that implements a tag cloud-like aspect to the post labels feature in Blogger. Labels help us narrow down our reading when we want a specific set of posts. The blogroll makes it easy for us to find each other's blogs. The Pogue's Posts is a feed subcription to David Pogue's tech columns in the NY Times, fitting in a course like this. The Hangman game gadget fits for two reasons: it has writing and one must have some fun on a website. Haven't played hangman in a while, have you? Give it a go.

What's in your blog?

Got a Minute for BTmplates?

BTemplates has 60 pages of Blogger templates. For those unsatisfied with the basics provided by Blogger, and willing to take a few minutes to figure out how to upload a different template, BTemplates may be just the ticket.

Organized by categories, BTemplates helps you find what you want. And once your template is in Blogger, you can add your own customizations. (Don't be shy; give it a try. Be sure to post a comment with a link if you decide to upload a template.)

Aren't we talking about interfaces and operating systems? Check out the Retro MacOS theme (page 60, on the day I went to the site).

Label Cloud Implemented

I had been wanting to put a tag cloud on the course blog for a couple years. But Blogger doesn't have a cloud out of the box, and I never really took the time hunt down a custom-made widget. Then I found phydeaux3's Label Cloud javascript implementation. Three snips of code and Voila!