My Blogger template is done by me, myself and I.

It took me quite a while to finish it. Why? Because I had to learn how blogger templates work, I had to refresh my HTML, CSS and JavaScript knowledge and I had to do a lot of graphics tweaking to get the right look.

The result is not that beautiful, but it's got all those bonus features that I just can't do without. Also, it's pretty nice for being done by me.

Well, I didn't do it all by myself. I have actually stolen the graphics from the Grungy blogger template, although I have modified it quite a lot.

I found the code for making a tag cloud on phydeaux3's blog. However, I didn't understand the JavaScript so I started refactoring (without a test safety net *argh*). Then I removed functionality that I didn't want and changed things to fit into my style sheet. The final result looks nothing like the original.

Another thing I wanted was expandable post summaries like the ones you find in WordPress. This was excellently described in the blogger help sections.

Finally, I wanted a static (non-blog) page where I could write something about myself (and also about the template -- this page!). Unfortunately I couldn't find any description on how to do this. All I found was the trick of backdating your posts, making them appear last in the archive.

Not good enough for me! So I started tweaking with the blogger widget tags and JavaScript and finally came up with a solution. If you are interested in how I did it, post a comment and I will write about it here. If you are a real blogger template whiz you can probably figure it out by reverse engineering the HTML source though.

And that's about it!