Saturday, November 9, 2002 - Sat, 9 Nov 2002

Fantastic! I finished setting up my Behold blog page. It took about 3 hours to get everything right. I just love the way it looks.

The template I picked up from Blogger.com was originally done by Eric Costello and is a magnificent piece of work. Written with javascript and CSS, it does require newer browsers to view properly, but still looks okay in older browsers. It is very pretty, and has dynamic color morphing (really neat!) and you can click a button to change the font and font size or link to new pages. My younger daughter
really liked the color changing and I’m going to use its color selection algorithm that picks nice combinations of pastel, for future coloring tools in Behold.

Now the job of customizing. Replacing their content with my content is easy. Tweaking the Cascading Style Sheets to get the formatting as I wanted it didn’t take too long. Then I noticed the colors switched randomly whenever you refresh the page. Hey! It would be neat to add a button to do that. Simple thing, right? Well, nothing is ever simple in Javascript. The color switching was integrated with the color morphing. It was a struggle to work through it but finally, I was able to get it working and even added a “Stop Color Morphing” button. Again really neat.

I let my daughter play with it for awhile while I ate. When I came back, the screen was locked and the text was huge and all the buttons were gone and even a browser screen refresh wouldn’t set it back. I took a look at the javascript, and I couldn’t believe it, but it saved a cookie containing the text size and font. My daughter kept increasing the font and that huge font was saved. Well this was no good. I didn’t want anything that saved cookies anyway and removed all of that stuff. Getting the default font and size when accessing the page will be good enough.

So there it is. I now have my own blog that is basically just an html page with a template (style sheet). I am now independent of Blogger and the other tools, and have more flexibility to edit and update my blog without relying on them. In a way, that’s too bad. I liked Blogger and how it was set up and would have used it. But it just was too “buggy” for me.

Spent another hour adding the last few days of “blog” stuff to this page, and that’s enough for now.