Notice anything different?

I've been working on my blog template today...lots of changes. I got rid of the old "archive" page that served no real purpose, and pointed the "archive" links to the little archive box on the lower right. I also made links to the other boxes on the right hand side, and I added a new box: search. With a little CSS, I was able to customize the box and button to make them less obtrusive.

The post content area is also horizontally expandable, thus bringing my website into the 21st century. Now I will monopolize your browser real estate regardless of your resolution...ahaha!

The archive month pages now only list post date, time, and title, instead of showing the entire post. This is more convenient for searching for a specific item (assuming you don't, say, use the search), but it also means I need to go back into my archives and add titles for every post. No big deal, but I haven't done it yet :P

Eventually I'm hoping to have a separate blog account for each section of my website, and they will all use this same template. Before I do that, I want to figure out a way to list all my blogs in my sidebar without doing it manually. Surely there is some way to do it. I've emailed Blogger to ask.

I wanted to create a "latest comments" area, which would list when the last few comments were posted and who posted them, with links to the comments...but there appears to be no way to do that, so I emailed Blogger.

I also wanted to do Blogger's expandable post summaries hack, but check out this lovely bit at the bottom:

However, the "read more" link is in the template, so it will appear regardless of whether a post has been truncated or not. (Modifying this feature is left as an exercise for the reader.)

I suppose they thought that was cute. I, however, found it thoroughly obnoxious. Thanks, Blogger, for the totally useless "hack".

I mean, seriously. Who wants to have "read more" written on posts that don't have any additional content? I was trying to wrap my brain around a way to hide the "read more" link when it was unnecessary, and I'm sure it's possible in JavaScript or something, but I'm not a programmer and it's really a lot of hassle to solve a problem that Blogger could have dealt with by allowing for expandable post summaries in their WYSIWYG interface. (Post-Nuke, for example, has two text boxes, and if you have a really long post you can put the additional text in the second one.)

I realize that this is a free service and it's lame to check the teeth of a pony you got as a present, but that last little snide comment just burns me up. "Left as an exercise for the reader", my ass.

My dream of categories for my blog has pretty much died...I'm thinking about making different blogs for each category and then linking them on the sidebar, assuming Blogger responds with a way for me to list my blogs in that way. Here's hoping. I think that I may be able to manipulate the RSS feeds to create a page with all the posts on it, but I'm not certain, and I'm trying not to get my hopes up.

Aaaaaaaand that's about it.