New blog template

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog may come to it today and say "hey, what happened to your buttoned-up mind?"

That's a good question.

I've been using the same template for almost a year now, and it was starting to wear out its welcome. Not that I didn't like it, but there were parts of it that were getting annoying.

First, the columns were too small. In my weekly one-hit wonders posts, some of the videos were getting truncated unless I edited the HTML to shrink them. Even if I did that, I was thinking that the middle column was just too narrow.

Secondly, I was beginning to feel that the gadget columns were becoming crowded and clunky-looking. In that template, both gadget columns were on the same side, with the blog itself being on the left. This was fine, but as time went on it started to look kind of bland. Plus, the colouring was fading (not literally, of course, but just in my head). I don't necessarily want bright colours (if I did, I certainly wouldn't have chosen *this* template), but I wanted something that blended into the background a bit, something softer.

The final straw was when I saw the cool Neoseeker globe on my friend Dawn's blog. I decided I wanted it on my blog. When I installed it, however, the column was too small and it was truncated too! In fact, the right-hand part, which controls the globe itself, wasn't even on there!

That was just going too far.

So I went looking for some suitable 3-column templates where the columns were much wider than my previous one.

Fairly quickly, I stumbled upon the Notebook 2.0 Blogger template. I was in love, but I wanted to check around a bit more first. I did find a couple of cool ones, and one of these days I may actually try one of those templates with a "featured article" rotating item on the front page. They still intimidate me, though.

In the meantime, I tried this on my "Testing Blog" and saw that it worked even better than I had hoped.

I just needed some spare time so I could customize it.

Tonight, I had that time.

So what do you think? Do you like it better? Do you prefer the other one (it's an academic question, because I'm not going back unless this one starts giving me technical problems, but I'm still interested in opinions) or do you like this one better?

A couple of points:

1) One feature of this template is the "Pages" menu just above the start of the blog. This is where it says "Home," "Contact Info," and "About this Blog". Blogger now lets you create static pages and this template automatically puts any pages you create into this menu bar. You can take them out if you wish, of course.

Thus, if you want to contact me, just click on "Contact Info" and it's all right there!

Having an "About this blog" page allows me to remove it from my gadgets columns, streamlining them a bit.

2) I also got rid of a couple of things.

First, the "Share This" thing is gone. Instead, I'm using Blogger's sharing tools that have the basics: Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc. Nobody was using the "Share This" button anyway, so why let it clutter up the blog?

I've also consolidated a few things on the side, just to clean it up. I now have fewer gadget labels because I combined them (like the video games and blog awards)

I would really appreciate your input and suggestions, if you have any.