Migration to New Blogger complete

I've taken the final step of fully converting to The New Version of Blogger, namely selecting a new template. On the outside it doesn't look like a new template, but the inner workings and widgets are certainly shiny and new. There's a few new template designs that were tempting, but for now the added functionality for me and useability for my readers is enough.

The template upgrade process was fairly painless. Blogger keeps a copy of your old template, but I made a copy of the HTML myself before upgrading so I could cut-and-paste anything the conversion process dropped. One cool thing is that it allows you to preview new templates with your actual current blog content, not just generic placeholders, so you have a good feel for how it's going to look.

Pretty much everything transferred over, though I had to add back in any java scripts (remember your site statistics scripts!) from the old template and any other custom HTML I had that was outside of the basic page elements. My lists of links, friends' blogs and gaming blogs all came over. I had to futz around in the template HTML to adjust my margins again and it's not quite right yet, but it's pretty close. Each section, or page element, of the blog (i.e., header, outer, main, sidebar, footer, etc.) has its own "wrapper" parameters to be adjusted.

The best features of this new template are two new page elements that add extra useability for readers. The first is the labels index, allowing easy sorting for a particular subject. The second is a revamping of the archive which now allows readers to "drill down" to see a list of posts made in a particular month. I'll continue experimenting, so you might see slight changes here and there from time to time. Let me know if anything looks amiss and what is good, too.

Related link: Blogger Beta conversion