Is that scary or what?
I can actually still see the template in my head, and it's kind of cool. It's Victorian and very flowery.
In my dream it was on someone else's blog, and I clicked a button to "apply it to my blog", which occurred instantly. Wouldn't that be a neat feature? Maybe blog hosts/software developers could create something to interact with themselves/each other/browsers. Has someone done this already?
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Xanga has a skins feature, where you can look through all of these skins that fellow bloggers have created, and there IS a button for you to apply the skin to your own blog; guess that's a tiny bit different, but overall the same thing. I checked out Xanga before I finally decided on Blog-City, way back when I had my first blog. I don't remember specific reasons, now, for going with the Blog-City one, but I DO know it's just less confusing than Xanga, especially if you're someone who's more interested in literary content, and don't care if your main page plays your favorite song (option to loop, none the less!) or not, and does "cool" --read: largely annoying-- things with your background and text.
hehehehehe.
Well, most blog software has skins--user-created or otherwise--that you can apply in your blog's control panel. And that's fine and dandy. But!
These skins are not cross-platform, nor can you visit someone's blog and click a button to use their skin/theme/template.
I'm imagining a button built into my browser, or maybe a browser toolbar, that would 1) know where your blog was and 2) know how to find skin/theme/template code, so that 3) when you pressed the button, it would, immediately, without you having to log in to your control panel, skin your blog. (After that, a "See your new skin now!" link would be nice.)
To make this even remotely feasible, template designers would have to create multiple versions. These versions could then be "called" by special code in the top of the template. For example, if I'm using Blogger and I like someone's WordPress theme, I would press the button, and the tool would look at the WordPress theme, find the link to the Blogger version in the template properties, and go and download that and then upload it to my blog.
This could go for things other than just templates. What if you saw a counter (bleh), or a music player, or a tagboard, or a picture viewer on someone's blog that you liked? What if you could just click a button to have it added to your blog? (This software would have to be aware of all features of all blog software in order to pull this off, because some of these features are built-in/available as plugins. So instead of sticking some javascript or something into your page to call a third-party application, the button would know to install the one that already exists in your blog software.)
What I'm thinking of is something that would be cross-platform, instead of a specialized design. And it would be great if the toolbar had a search, too...so if you knew you wanted to have a newsbox, you could just type in "newsbox" and the button would know what to do. It would be like...the Google of blog design, except it wouldn't just search things, it would go ahead and apply them for you.
Actually, here's how I envision the toolbar:
First, a drop-down menu, so you can pick which blog you're wanting to apply stuff to. Included would be an "Add New Blog" option. Then there'd be a searchbox. If you type something in there, it'll load examples of what you typed in the main browser window that are only relevant to your blog. You can then click on the example that you like, and hit the "Apply to My Blog" button, and the tool will do it automatically. (You can do your own tweaking in your blog's control panel.)
After the searchbox, there'd be the "Apply to My Blog" button, which, when not being used in the searchbox capacity, would refer to whatever live site you are currently browsing. When you click it, the tool would find all the different pieces of the blog and list them in the main browser window. So, for example, my blog might have the list:
Template
Name: Augusta Spring
Author: Heather Meadows
Available for Skinning: No
Wish Lists
Amazon.com
Adaptable to My Blog: Yes
Blogroll
Powered by Bloglines
Adaptable to My Blog: Yes
There'd be check boxes next to each feature, and the user would then click on the ones they wanted. For stuff that requires extra information, like the url(s) for the Wish List(s) or the placement for the items on your page, a window would pop up and ask for it. Once the user had filled out the form, the window would close and their information would show next to the feature in the main browser window.
At this point the "Apply to My Blog" button would grey out, and there'd be an "Apply Now" button at the bottom of the page in the main browser window. There'd also be a "Preview" checkbox, so that when checked, you'd see how your blog would look without actually changing it.
For this to work, the application would have to understand your page layout. I imagine that this could be accomplished by "smart templates" that contain good documentation/comments identifying each section. And, of course, there'd be the header specifying where the templates for the different blog software can be found.
That last would be imperfect, as template designers don't always (never?) make their designs for all software, but that's how it would have to be until someone figures out a way to adapt all code to all other code, or until the blog software developers themselves make their code work with all templates.
(Ultimately we would hope that the latter is the way things are going, considering the grand movement to separate form from function. But companies will always want to keep their products unique and inscrutable, so I don't know if it's realistic to expect it.)
And there you have it, a fantastic idea for a fantastic product that millions of people would use. Surely someone out there can figure out how to write it and make money off of it.
Internet, go!
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