It's been a very fruitful evening. I've spent the last 3-1/2 hours fiddling with the blogger templates, trying to find one that gives me the type of flexibility I wanted, with enough room to customize it to my design.

It took me a while to decide which existing template I wanted to use. I finally settled on the template called "Roundy Stretchy Corners" because it defined it's tables in terms of percentages of screen real estate. This way, I can be certain that the blogger will behave acceptably regardless of the screen resolution of the end user. Also, where a higher resolution is being used, more of the screen will actually be used to display meaningful information. This is unlike many of the templates which, by using a fixed-pixel width for tables, caused the screen to be sparsely used under high resolutions.

Despite the fact that the template was basically how I wanted, there were issues regarding the manner that poster information was displayed. I also felt that the date fields were not prominent enough. After some judicious changes to the embedded style sheet (bless the heart of whoever designed this template), I finally got a look I could live with.

The next challenge, and ultimately one that I could not solve without a workaround, was one of "data repeatability". Unlike some templates that show the entire archive history on the main screen, this template simply has an archive link, and a separate "Archive" page is launched when you click on the appropriate link. What I wanted to do is take all the template customizations I did, and separate them into a couple of "include" files. My intent was to upload the include files to my website, and reference those files from inside the template at blogspot.com. I don't know if it was a matter of not knowing the proper syntax, but despite all efforts, I could not get the blogspot page to read the include file on my personal website.

In the end, I ended up cutting/pasting the appropriate code into the MAIN template and the ARCHIVE template. But it means that as I add website links to my local copy, I will have to edit BOTH of the templates and manually replace the current code with the new code. I still want to find a way to reference include files so that I only have to put changes in one place.

I'm pretty sure that the paid blogger modules can do server side includes using my own web server (if I had one). But, the free blogspot service uses a server for which I have no rights (outside of the automated blogger update screen). I don't think I have the ability to FTP .shtml files to their server.

Well, that's about it for tonight. Tomorrow, I will try to experiment with colours, to see if I care to make any changes to the basic colour scheme. Also, I'd like to add an email link to the blogger, but only if mail can be sent to a "blogger" mailbox and secretly forwarded to me. I don't want strangers to have a "real" email address for me.