Where's The "B"?

In 1984, the Wendy's hamburger chain asked

Where's the beef?

Today, thanks to the inconsistent deployment of the Template Designer in Production Blogger, I'm going to ask

Where's the "B"?

The "B" logo is so inconspicuous, yet so useful. And, thanks to the schizophrenic "Design" link, could be even more useful - if it were part of the Template Designer, which it is not.

Get Into The New Post Editor And Designer Templates Slowly, Or Quickly

How you start using the new post editor, and the new designer templates, is up to you. You can go slowly, or quickly - just know the possibilities, and the issues that affect your choice.

The New Designer Templates - Helping Drive Internet Bandwidth Requirements

If you're a regular viewer of any of the Nitecruzr Dot Net blogs, maybe recently you've noted hesitance or sluggishness when downloading or scrolling through my articles. I now have 4 blogs - see the Tab Bar above - The Buzz (this one), Blogging, Kitchen, and Musings - converted to designer templates. Each one uses a full size, 24 bit colour photo as background, with each photo using 6 - 8 M RAM. The hesitance or sluggishness is not your imagination.

See The Tabs Above?

That used to be a Pages gadget, which could only index static pages. If you replace the Pages gadget with a linklist, you have a Tabs Index with new possibilities.

The Missing "Template Designer" Link

Not everybody yet understands that the new Designer Templates are only available from the Blogger In Draft dashboard. Neither the Customize link in the navbar, nor any other shortcuts, will get you to the Draft "Page Elements" wizard - even if you are logged in to Blogger In Draft as your default.

Customising The Designer Templates

Since setting up this blog with a Designer Template, I've made a couple tweaks to the layout. One tweak removed the white background behind the posts - that took a brief few seconds, to find and use the GUI "Transparent" option. A second tweak involved centering the blog header (Title and Description, above) - and for that there is no GUI control, though the change still required only a brief few seconds.

Templates

Well, Blogger finally did it.

In Draft, today, you'll find the new Blogger templates. 3 column templates, templates that use transparency overlays, 4 column templates, even 3 and 4 columns, with split sidebars. And some very shiny backgrounds.

This will keep all the artistic types busy, for a good while. And there will be less damaged templates, from importing third party code.

From the Draft Blogger dashboard, select "Layout". From the navbar, "Customize". Then, "Template Designer".

So that's the end to boring Blogger templates. What you have now is a combinable inventory of 4 exciting styles, with separately selected layouts (2, 3, and 4 columns, split sidebars, left / right variations), a background library with colour palette, and adjustable column widths. Enough choices to keep many bloggers busy choosing.