As you might have noticed, I've made another update to the template of this blog. This is my fifth Blogger template, the third one for the new Blogger, and the third update on this blog. The image in the background is that of a glacier in Greenland. I got it from Wikimedia Commons. Image manipulation was done using The GIMP as usual.

One of the other templates I created, works on the new Blogger and can be downloaded for free, at City in Paint. It's based on an OSWD design, though I made some minor modifications to the look, and some major modifications to the HTML to get it to work with Blogger.

I'll be offering this one for download too, once I complete a few finishing touches.

Do let me know what you think about the new look. I'm hoping the (mostly) white background and the bigger text makes it easier on your eyes. The blog should look okay on Firefox, Opera, and IE 6 and 7. If you're among the less than 1% of readers who use a version of IE older than 6, then you might see some weird JavaScript errors. But those are from Blogger, and I can't really do much about them. Of course, if you are still using that ancient browser, you should really consider getting Firefox.

All the controversy with the design awards at the Indibloggies reminded me that I'd made updates to my own blog's design more than four months ago, and had been sitting on them since September. So here it is.

I did make a few minor tweaks between going live with my previous template and now though, so the following is a summary of all changes since June 2005.

• The most obvious change, of course, is the new template theme. The candle in the background is a public domain image I got from PD Photo.org. I used The GIMP as usual for all image manipulation.
• The second most obvious change if you're not using Internet Explorer is that the blog seems to float over the background (which remains fixed). The effect is based on the Complex Spiral demo by Eric Meyer. The effect breaks quite badly in IE because of a bug in Microsoft's implementation of CSS, so I used special styles to override it for IE 6 and below. The result isn't especially great to look at, but there's no other way out without using JavaScript. So if you want to see how I envisioned the design of this blog, please use Firefox. Any other standards-compliant browser should work fine too, of course.
• You should no longer have a horizontal scrollbar if you're using Firefox at a screen resolution of 800x600. Other browsers seem to have a broken implementation of min-width and max-width, so if you're not using Firefox, you'll still need to scroll horizontally. Firefox users at a higher resolution will see a wider layout.
• You can no longer make the Sidebar disappear, though sidebar sections still collapse (try clicking on the section title). I have the feeling most of you weren't even aware that this was possible before, but with the fixed background, IE made the effect difficult.
• Haloscan trackbacks are gone. I wasn't really using them anyway, so I replaced them with Blogger's back-links (This was done a couple of months ago).
• The blog should look better on machines without Verdana if you have the Bit Stream Vera Sans font installed. I had noticed that browsers without Verdana made this blog look quite ugly. (This change was made in July or August last year)

The change took between 24-30 hours to implement, more than half of which went into creation and tweaking of the images. The rest was mostly spent tracing and getting around different browser bugs (most of them IE of course, though Opera did give me some trouble).

Barring some minor html layout tweaks, this is mostly a CSS update, and a pretty simple one at that. If anyone is interested in using or modifying this template for their own blog, let me know and I'll be glad to share it with you.

This blog template was tested on Firefox 1.5, IE 6.0 and Opera 8.5 on Windows XP. I tested it on Linux a long time ago, and I'm hoping nothing's broken since then. Of course, I could easily have missed something (and I know that 2-3% of you use other browsers like Safari and Konqueror), so if you see something breaking, please let me know.

The old design is still available at Geek Whorled - my dormant technical blog.

Now, back to regular (or should I say irregular?) programming.