Wolf’s Little Store

A preview of the Blogger theme I’ve been working on can be found at my Blogger test blog. A download link will be up soon - while the theme has been tested in most browsers, I need to make sure it’s easily pluggable for a novice user/blogger. If you spot any bugs in your exotic browser, let me know.

Making blogger themes

Making a blogger theme is significantly easier than making a Wordpress theme. There are only 2 pages you need to design: the homepage (listing of blog posts) and the single post page. The latter means styling the comments beneath a blog post. The comment form itself is handled by a separate Blogger page (example). While this has it’s disadvantages (the visitor is pulled out of the site) it makes the job easier for the web designer.

You also have to style the widgets in the sidebar, but the markup is laid out very well making it easy to style the sidebar any way you want. There’s enough hooks (id’s and classes) to go wild.

Another thing to note is: since Blogger is a hosted service (your blog is hosted on any images you use in your theme need to be hosted on a separate server. This means absolute URLs in the CSS section of your template file, and hosting images on your own servers or an image service like Imageshack. If your theme gets very popular, you wind up with the hosting costs. If a site that uses your theme gets dugg, who knows what might happen?

Arrows without images

During the integration of the theme into Blogger, I discovered a neat trick: instead of making images for your arrows, use ▼ and ► instead. These are characters, not images. Using these reduces the size of your page, and makes sure the aliasing of the arrows is in line with the text. It’s also easy to style a color change of the arrow on hover.

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