A Man of My Town's New Look

I switched to a new template earlier today. Thanks to one of my dear readers, Fence, who maintains a tech blog on the side, I was finally able to find a template I really liked. Actually, I was ready to do the download early this morning but hesitated a bit because I needed some validation and support for my selection from my beloved SO. (Naks!) But once she gave it her seal of approval, download it I immediately did.

My old template was quite temperamental, to say the least. It was one of those classic Blogger templates. I picked it because I liked the simplicity of the design. Plus, I was new to blogging and was in a bit of a rush to come up with a template for my blog. In short, I didn't really know any better. I had assumed, wrongly, that any blogger template out there would work perfectly. And if it did not, that I would only have minimal problems at the most.

Well, work perfectly it certainly did not. Whenever I posted a new entry, I always ended up spending quite a bit of time fixing its format. I always had problems with spacing in between paragraphs and with the spacing in between lines within a paragraph. I also had problems posting pictures. More often than not, once the pictures were posted, the template failed to set up a proper and working hyperlink in Blogger. As a result, a reader won't be able to enlarge a photo once he/she clicked on it.

Looking at the bright side, I got to learn some basic programming commands in Html. It was born out of my desperation and desire to make sure that my blog entries were properly formatted once they got posted. Thus, I learned Html on a "trial and error" basis.

Well this new template is called Arbol. The simplicity of its design and nice choice of colors and fonts makes it easy on the eye. It was indeed "Very Zen", according to Fence in his write-up about this particular template. The only challenge was that since it was designed by Spaniards, the variable names and variable descriptions on the template's Html code were all in Spanish. Thank heavens that 300 years of Spanish colonization still left me with some understanding of the Spanish language within my diluted Filipino genes. Thus, I was able to figure things out within a few minutes and was able to make the necessary tweaks to the code.

I hope this template works and I hope that it will remain as my blog's "look" for quite a while. Thanks again, Fence.