Design

Blogware Mechanic #1: Basic Blog Customization, Part 1

The Blogware Mechanic: Tips and Tricks You Won't Find in the Manual

The Blogware Mechanic is a series of articles that covers how to get the most out of your Blogware blog through customization. In this series, we'll look at all sorts of ways to take advantage of the flexibility of the Blogware blogging platform and make your blog better-looking, easier to use, funkier, more highly-ranked by search engines and even help make you a little money! If you have a Blogware blog and want to soup it up like those fancy "A-lister" blogs, then this series is for you.

Every series has to start at the beginning, and that's what I'll do here. I'll begin with a couple of articles on basic customization. If you've been using Blogware for a while, there's a good chance that none of this will be new to you; in fact, you'll find the same information in the Blogware Publisher Guide. However, in the interest of being thorough and for the benefit of new Blogware users, I'm going to go over the basics before diving into the fancy stuff.

This article is the first of two that cover the basics of changing your blog's appearance. I'll cover two things:

  • Changing Your Blog's Color Scheme
  • Changing Your Blog's Column Layout

The rest of the article is after the jump.

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When Developers Create User Interfaces

Actually, I know a number of developers who have some sense of what a user interface should be like. But I also know some other developers, who when charged with creating a UI create monstrosities like the one below:

Screenshot of a very complicate ddialog box.
What's wrong with this dialog box? Click to see it at full size.

For more on this dialog box, see this entry in the blog Coding Horror.

If you're short on user interface designers, you might do well to follow the advice in this blog entry: Never design what you can steal.