Blogs, Layouts and Designs

I have started a number of other blogs on blogger.com.

My purpose has been to experiment with other blogging services and learn about user experience.

Originally, I had a few and now there are a dozen or more. They were and are all experimental. Managing the layouts of these blogs had become a headache. I was trying to figure out how to add hosted material and feeds and each had their own model. So, currently, I'm experimenting with the layout management tools that the new blogger.com service provides.

Recently, Google consolidated blogger.com's access management with access management for other Google services. Furthermore, blogger.com has taken a large step in rationalizing its templates and layout managers. Now, after choosing a template, the user can upgrade to the new layout manager which provides a simple GUI interface to handle widgets on the page. Blogger carries guidelines on how to define new widgets.

Since I had not made a huge investment in developing my own templates and layouts in the original experimental blogs, I decided to migrate them to the new layout and template formats and to create some new ones. I then used the guidelines to create some new widgets of my own, including a couple for Google's adsense for content. The scripting language for widgets, "includables," and page layout management proved quite simple to use, and defined properly, the widgets can be manipulated in the simple, graphic layout manager.