Edit your blog template : The longer but simpler way.

This post is specifically for the non-techie blogger. Geeks, alpha geeks ALT+F4 please!

Now, I have started my blog and I want to edit the template the way I want. Just a simple pre-condition I DON'T want to care about html or css gibberish. For heaven's sake I m blogging and not doing web designing. All I want is a clean simple interface which will let me customize my template to my heart's content.

Try doing that with blogger's template settings and you are in for a surprise. All that is presented is the template itself with the gibberish you neither care about nor do you know what to do with it. Where's that WYSIWYG editing facility?? Should you resign to the fate that there is no such utility for you to customize your blog without learning about html? Atleast I won't. Here's what I did.

I googled googled and googled more until I discovered fckeditor which is a cool open source app that lets you generate instant html content. I am sure there are many "online html editors" but somehow this one appealed to me, simply because it let me use the application just like that! So, since I wanted to modify the template, I needed the application to work backwards from the html source to plain-text. Pretty simple, I fed in dummy text and generated its html version, then replaced that with the code of my blog template and there you go! the dummy text was replaced by the blog template just ready for editing. I can change whatever I want in my template now and that too without worrying about linking intricacies. I love this!

For the time being I have just added "Blogs I read" on the sidebar. Over time you'll see a more mature blogroll and many more changes in the blog's presentation. So if you are the "non-techie" wanting to control your blog page, this was your simple lesson in html editing, with zilch investment in html. Have fun!