My Odyssey ...

I had been plucking up the courage, for about a week, to give my blog a face lift. A new template, a couple of widgets and so on. Found some templates, that were blogger friendly, here , so yesterday, I decided to give it a go.

First up was a three column, cafe template. I followed the directions, saved my blog to a file on my computer, took a deep breath, deleted the old code, and pasted the new. It didn't work. Further investigation revealed that I have 'new blogger' and not 'old blogger', which meant I needed the XML coded templates.

Okay, no problem, I have my old code saved on my computer. Delete new code and paste old code. View my blog and get a blank, blue screen. Arghhhhhhhh!!!! Apparently in copying the old code, I'd missed something.

Fortunately, and I'm not sure when, a copy of my original blog had been saved on blogger and when that popped up, I was able to restore the blog. I still can't work out where that happened, but believe me I was grateful. :-)

You'd think that at that point, I'd learn my lesson and give up. Not this girl! After taking an hour or so to recover, I girded my loins and once more jumped back in the fray.

This time, I noticed the button that said 'Download full template'. Template duly downloaded and sitting snugly in my hard drive. Now I could go play.

Installed the right version of the cafe template. Added photos and assorted widgets. Hmmmmmm. Phoned daughter in New Zealand and asked her to take a look. She agreed with me that it didn't look quite right. The photos and widgets didn't fit neatly for some reason. So we started going through the various templates on the aforementioned site. Fortunately my phone company gives me good rates to NZ and an hour on the phone is only $3.60..... :-)

We made a list of possibles. I hung up and then spent an hour happily swapping templates. Finally found one that I thought I could live with and went to reinstall it. At that point, I think Blogger might of got a little fed up with this female that obviously could not make up her mind, because it threw a wobbly and refused to cooperate any longer. Tried another couple of times, kept getting the same error message. Okay, I'm not stupid, I know when to give it a rest. Not throw in the towel, mind you, just take a break.

Reinstalled the old blog, though it was now missing it's SITS button and other stuff, and went to bed.

So, today is a new morning. If anybody happens to visit my blog today and it either isn't there or is acting oddly, it will just be me doing a renovation and embarking on another learning curve :-)

Cheers..