Sunday, August 10, 2008

Sweet mother of templates

Someone in EtsyGreetings sent the link to this wonderful page of free blog templates: http://lenatoewsdesigns.blogspot.com/

So first I messed around with just changing my template to one of theirs. I really liked a few of them except for "_____" where "______" was the image at the top or the background or some other detail that didn't it my personal style/snarkitude (how dare they be imperfect, the free site amazing service that they are and all). I chose one I thought was close enough and started to personalize it, but the top image just kept bothering me and I wondered if I could change it to my scissors background thing I use on my shop banner without exploding all the HTML code and such.

Fortunately, I am a giant nerd. I found the spot in the HTML for the template that had the link to the image I didn't want. I dragged it into Photoshop, thinking I'd just play around with it a little, maybe add a poop heart or some of the sheep that Amy drew for the "ewe" cards. But it looked dumb, so I tried using the original banner's dimensions and changing it entirely to my scissors thing, then uploading my new branded-ier banner to flickr, taking the URL of the full size image, and pasting it into the template HTML where the old banner image link was. Bingo. But now my banner didn't go with the background (which I really liked). So I found the background image URL (not far from the banner one) and started playing with THAT, only to overhaul THAT whole thing...I'm still not thrilled with the background, but I feel very techno-savvy and my blog is now undeniably mine-looking. Maybe tomorrow I'll take some photos of googly eyes and yarn or something and turn that into the background instead. Seems a bit ridiculous considering how much time I spent arranging those photos for the current background, but I'm in Super-Fuzzy-Stabby-Head Mode, so I was bound to get stuck on some strange useless project or another.

No, Freud (my dog), you may not have my artichoke kalamata hummus.

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