Research,Pt 2

ACtually, you know what, if I'm to do this, I'm gonna do it right (well until I get too lazy to write it all down). I'll document here, or try to, everything I read and my thoughts. Maybe this could be useful for someone else, to see the thought process that goes behind designing a blog.

First let me say I am BY NO MEANS a proffesionnal. I don't even know if I can say I'm an amateur because I've done all of 2 designs. I will count my LiveJournal "blog", that is how I learned HTML and CSS and when I started learning how to tweak both, even if only very very rudimentarily. Then I did my own blog design at Color Me Domestic, but that was a lot more graphical design and I didn't touch too much the template code except to add a couple of widgets.

So now that that is out of the way, I'll say this. If you like this stuff (I mean coding and designing) then your hard work is all that stands in the way. I'm positive I will come out of this with my own personnal made template and graphic elements. It may take a while, because I have other things I SHOULD focus on (*cough* writing my thesis *cough*), but this is more fun.

Complete side note, I did something yesterday that is making me very very happy today, even though it is SUCH a trivial thing. What is it? I cleaned my keyboard. Yes I know trivial. I popped off every key and rubbed them all with 50% ethanol (I think, why does the bottle not clearly label what type of alcohol is in there?! that's what we need to do at the lab!). And then I cleaned under the keys. There were so.many.crumbs it was DISGUSTING. Anyway, so now as I'm typing this, because I only sorta have my "doighté" (I don't know the english term??? you know when you don't need to look at your keybooard when you type?) I CAN do it, but my eyes always go back to looking at the keyboard, it's just faster. Anyway, yes I am just so happy inside that it's so clean and beautiful. I need to do my boyfriend's keyboard next. It's 10X worst than mine was.

Ok back to topic. Which was....I don't know. Where was I going with this?? Ok, documenting I suppose.

I read this series yesterday, dating back to 2007, about the basics of a template. Quick enough read, and I think it's important to understand the anatomy of a template before you start messing with it. Here: http://www.ourblogtemplates.com/2007/06/tutorials-on-blogger-template-design.html

This doesn't mean I understand everything that is written in the template, but I know the parts, which is a good start. I think it's important to really UNDERSTAND this stuff, only then can you really make something truly unique.

Next. I need to read some articles from http://www.w3schools.com/ They were referenced over and over again in the series above, and they are still up to date. I think this will really help in know what the different codes are in the template, and the different options are for changing them.

My problem right now is that I have a ton of tabs open with different articles and series about web design. I kinda have ADHD when it comes to this stuff... Which is why I am referencing here what I find that I want to read later (I suppose I could also use Pocket)

And a couple more things I want to take note of if I need it later:
1. http://styletil.es/ Love the look of this site (the doodly-ness, that's what I want in my own blog, but I've not too good at drawing or anything, so we will see how that pans out). Looks like it would be good to help you establish what you want your blog or website to look like, the layout, the color scheme and the fonts, they mention.

2. Tools for responsive design http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/rwd-tools/ 50 of them

3. Blogger Template Design series start here: http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/01/creating-three-column-or-wide-two.html I guess. The baellabel (holy cow that was a messed up typo, I didn't even know at first what I was trying to say1) for the serie doesn't work, and there's no table of contents type page. Still seems like it's well written and easy to understand.


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Alright, so I went through the CSS tutorials on W3schools. While I learned some tricks and got some ideas as to how to do some of the things I want to do in my template, it was not specific at all to blog templates. I do think I have a better grasp of how to write CSS, the difference between id and classes, but it also brought up a lot of questions. So I'm off to find something more relevant to blog template css. I think I'll read through blogger buster now. That might be all I do tonight.

Oh and I just found this free ebook about blogger template design, I think: http://blog.themeforest.net/installation-guides/free-e-book-the-blogger-template-book/

TBC...