sick and tired

Today was one of those days when I'm sick and tired of EVERYTHING. And I mean everything. Here's a short list of "everything": stupid shopping centres with Christmas music on 24/7, public transport with seats that smell like piss, bittorrent downloads with slower than dialup speed, media coverage of the bush fires, more media coverage of the bush fires, Iraq "civil war", books (*shock*, me? sick of books?), this blog...
So, what did I do? I set out to bring peace to the world.

Sadly, before my noble thought of changing the world was put into action, said thought was abandoned. Firsly, it wouldn't suit the image of a True Evil Genius I've been created this past year. My aim should be world domination not world peace. Secondly, how can someone succeed at something countless Miss Universe winners had attempted and failed before?

However, I couldn't afford to do nothing so instead of changing the world (which, in truth, is out of my reach) I changed my blog template. Now, before you start laughing at me, let me tell you that was no easy feat.

Template tweaks
lable cloudlink, Peekaboo postslink,

I've been thinking for a while now that my blog is a bit bland. I haven't really tried to muck around with it much. Last year I spent a week mucking around with the old Blogger template and Photoshop and produced something that just barely worked. When I changed from Blogger to Blogger Beta I made myself a promise that I would never ever poke my head into those CSS codes again.

Like my other promises I made to myself, e.g. stop reading books, stop spending too much money,..., I didn't keep that promise. Well I did, until I got sick of the template that is. If you're in my shoes you would be sick of my template too. The Labels side-bar was overflowing (all thanks to me inventing too many labels), the blog roll and links list are in a shamble. The combination of all of those made my side-bar way longer than my posts.

So I did a bit of Google-ing and came up with the codes to make Label clouds. If you don't know what that is, take a look at my labels on the right side-bar. Isn't it awesome?

Hearten by my success with the Label cloud, I declared a pox on the no-mucking-around-with-the-template rule and did a mini overhaul of it. The result? 3-column blog! However, putting in the second side-bar literally squeezed my posts. Now the posts are longer than the bars!

No matter! After some more google-ing, I came up with the peekaboo post thingy. Now everything is taken care of. I don't hate my blog template any more. One thing's still bugging me though. I should bring the banner back, maybe a new banner?

Blogger beta rocks!

If you're wondering what's the firetruck happens to my blog, stop wondering. I didn't do something stupid like mucking away at the template I wrote last year and forgot to save a backup template hence I had to stick with some lame highly unoriginal templates provided by Blogger. Nope, no such thing happened. It was just that I got offered a chance to try out Blogger Beta and jumped at it. Blogger Beta rocks.
Let's talk about the good points first:

• Labels, finally blogger has labels. I've been wanting labels for a while now and couldn't have the time to poke around some Blogger hacks to put labels on my blog. I tried to compensate for that by having a Wordpress mirror which is fully label supported. The problem with Wordpress is that it's too freaking slow, even at cable speed it was slow [or maybe it was just my rotten luck]. I don't really have to say anything about Wordpress on dialup, do I? It was excruciatingly slow.
• Super fast. Blogger Beta offers basically the same stuffs as Wordpress, with the exception of an in built counter however, Blogger Beta was fast, probably faster than the old blogger. Wordpress eats Blogger Beta's dirt.
• Customise is child's play. Yes, child's play. There are a few widgets available and customise backgrounds, fonts, font size, font colours are as easy as abc. I remember the pain I had to go through last year to customise my blog, this is just too easy.
• add links with ease. Adding links to the template in Blogger was a real pain in the ass. However, you can always use del.icio.us or blogrolling.com to reduce that pain. Blogger Beta offers a real cure for the pain. Just log in and post links away. I'm loving this.
  
• Heaps of new features like private blogs and invite only blogs. Frankly, these are the stuffs that I really don't care about hence the short paragraph. For more info click here

Now to the down points

• No counter yet. There's been some rumour about Google intergrating Measure Map into Blogger but so far, nothing yet.
• Can't edit HTML source code. I love my old template even though it was a bit dodgy. Especially my banner which I made personally. My old template was personalised, not just customised. HTML editing is "coming soon" but how soon is anyone's guess.

So that's it for the down points so far. Now I have to do some back tracking and post labels to all my old posts, that should take a while.