I am sure the regular readers of this blog have noticed the change. This Linux blog has had a make over. Even though it would seem sudden to the regular readers of this blog , I had long perceived this change to be inevitable. Not that I found anything wrong with the old design but when Google upgraded the blogger blog engine to include a flood of features, it also made drastic changes to the template.
As with all things related to Google, quality plays a very important role. And at least with blogs hosted on blogger.com, backward compatibility also rates quite high. What does backward compatibility mean as far as this blog is concerned, you ask ? Well, there are over 360 articles on this 2 year old blog, many of them quite popular. When I decided to eventually make the switch from the old blogger engine to the new blogger engine, the entire switch completed in less than 2 minutes. And to underline the google trademark, all the page addresses, as well as the old template was preserved intact across the switch. So as far as the visitors of this blog need concern, so long as you did not visit during the actual time of the switch, you won't have noticed the change-over at all.
So the question in your minds must be why did I tinker with the design of the site, right ? With the old template, I wouldn't have been able to make use of a number of new features that Google has incorporated in the new blogger.com the most visible of them being 'categories' - the exact terminology used by Google is 'labels'. The blogger developers have also made it much easier to edit the style and color of the blogs by incorporating - believe it or not - drag and drop placement. So even a non-techie guy will now be able to put together his own personalized blog with out tinkering with any HTML code. I will explain the new features of blogger.com in a succeeding post.
As you can see, now instead of a two column layout, this blog features a three column layout. The blog is much more wider and is quite viewable in 800x600 and above resolutions. There is lots more white space which will allow the readers better clarity of thought while reading the articles. And the individual pages of this blog loads faster than it were before the switch. I hope all of you find the new design of this blog quite refreshing. However, this is not the final version of the design, I will be tweaking it bit-by-bit in the coming days or weeks and hopefully will be able to work out something even better. Though I concede, I do not have the stamina to do it in one go ;-).
