Blog Overhaul

I do many things here at The Everyday Adventurer. Most of them involve bringing you my experiences with nature. But there are also many more things I do behind the scenes that I'm proud of. One of my most recent projects has been updating The Everyday Adventurer.

You may not be able to see the changes I've made, but that's because all of the changes were beneath the surface. I originally created the look of The Everyday Adventurer a few years ago on top of the old blogger template system. This look was inspired by a Wordpress theme called Soulvision. You may have seen similar blogs out there. You may also notice that they're not exactly the same as mine. Those others are a template those people downloaded. I created and modified mine myself.

But in recent months I've decided that it was time to update my blog to the new Blogger system of doing things. The new Blogger with its Template Designer gives us tools that make it easier to modify our blog templates. On the old system I had to go in and edit the template of the blog. That is a very dangerous thing for most users. You can completely destroy your blog doing that.

On top of all that, when you modify your blog this way, it breaks many of the other easy Blogger features. Editing the template means that you are now stuck having to edit the template again and again even for simple additions that Blogger makes, like the Location feature I recently added. I had to add that in the template. Normal bloggers would only have to check a simple box and okay it. But there is a way out of these problems.

There is the new Template Designer. The picture above shows the Add CSS section of the Advanced section of the Template Designer. Instead of editing the blog template, you can go here to add simple CSS code to modify your blog. The Template Designer shows you your changes as you make them, and if you mess up too bad you can simply delete the CSS code that you already typed.

CSS code can be very powerful when you learn a little bit. I have designed all three of my websites, and I did it just like I'm describing here. I used simple CSS code and Bloggers other easy options to manipulate one of Bloggers new templates, and I turned it into The Everyday Adventurer.

Now I can modify the easy things as easily as anyone else. And my knowledge of CSS code gives me more power to change bigger things. This is all without having to ever edit the original template of the blog. The Everyday Adventurer now sits on top of Blogger's Awesome Inc. template. Anyone who's ever tried that one knows they are very different.

So try some experimentation of your own. You may be able to make something that you never dreamed of. Like I said, all three of my blogs are designed by me. Rat Tales is probably the closest to the original Blogger template, but it still looks very different. That one took very little work, so you can do it too. You should never again have to rely on anyone else for a cool blog design.

I know this was a very different post than my usual nature stuff. It's just another interest of mine, and I wanted to show it off. I hope some of you liked reading it. If any of you would like to read more things like this, maybe some tips to help you learn some of these things that I did, just give me some encouragement in the comments section. See ya next time with some good nature stuff.