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Blogger template customization had been keeping me busy over the past days, and I must admit, it seemed rather difficult for a beginner, like me, to edit XML. Like most blogger users, I myself, wanted my blog or site to look stylish and functional. But since, I'm a blogger hosted blog, I can only do little to make it look good as compared to those who have self-hosted wordpress blogs.

I must admit, I had the initial inkling that I wanted to leave blogger and to become a wordpress user; given the fact that if I find a stable, reliable, good and free web host that doesn't have forced advertisement on it, I'll migrate my blog over to it. But since, I haven't found any of this initial criterion yet, I'm sticking with the free hosted blogger site, and endure the pain of editing the XML manually.

Since, XML is a pain in the a**, and that minor changes can lead to template "not being parsed correctly"; I had difficult time editing the core template to incorporate the changes that I found necessary for my site to become functional, yet still stylish. In order for me to manage editing my site, I created a dummy site to edit the template there itself, so as not to ruin the current template that I had been used to.

The first change that I did, on this template was to embed the comment form of blogger into every post pages. Yes, blogger has now have that feature of placing the comment form just directly below each of the post that a certain site contain. But the draw back is, only a few blogger site can change their comment form structure; those who had a customized blogger template, like this one, will just end up being frustrated on not having to implement that new feature. If you wanted to know how to place the same comment form directly below your site, just check out Blogger Buster's site for information that could help you do it. For those who had edited their template but still cannot make the new changes to work, after following Amanda's instructions, then I suggest you find the word CommentMsg on your template, and from there start modifying the codes that comes before it.

The second change that I did was of course the footer section. I haven't finished placing the widgets to it yet, but my footer now is like a wordpress footer with 3 columns in it. Thanks again to Amanda of the Blogger Buster site for her wonderful tutorial to it.

Third thing that I really wanted to do was to have a menu bar just below the header image, and now I have it. Still, it's not perfect, but I have to admit, I like how I manage to find a suitable code to edit that portion.

Last on the changes list was of course placing different advertisements inside the post pages itself. This one really took most of my time, since placing different codes, be it javascript or html, inside the post pages could definitely ruin your progress in editing your template and could lead you to the not parsed error.

Anyway, I'll share more of what I had done in this template next time, and I'll be more specific into how I manage to edit it. I'm just too tired now to put every thing into words since my thoughts are too disorganized as of the moment. I'm so sorry for my poor post structure today. :(