Making Changes.......

PHEW!

I was finally able to switch over to the new Blogger and am relieved that it went off without a hitch. It was MUCH easier than I anticipated.

With the new Blogger you can use really neat things like labels to categorize your posts - this is something I very much want to utilize in order to make this site more user-friendly. They also have a drag and drop utility for your template that makes things like adding links and inserting HTML code into your blog very easy. No more sifting through lines and lines of template because you can add and edit template content in neat little chunks - it's very easy, with no need to republish. No more watching dashes swirling around in that yellow triangle! No fears, though - you can still go in and tweak your template just as you could before - changing column widths, colors, etc. The new Blogger seems every bit as customizable, thank goodness.

However, in order to take advantage of all that new Blogger has to offer, you have to change your template over the new format and that means losing any customizations you have done. Sigh. Seems that with every technological advance, you must go a little backwards in order to make it easier in the end. I'm very confident it will be worth it.

I have spent the day tweaking one of my test blogs and I have most of it figured out - I have my columns lined up correctly, my header back in order and most of my colors changed, but there's still some tweaking to do with adding back in all the sidebar content, along with HTML code for things like Flickr, etc. I'll slowly be doing this over the weekend, so the blog may be a bit of a mess until it is complete.

I'll try to catch up with my cooking posts once this is all done, but for now, I'm going to plow ahead and try to get this done..............