Finally got my custom template up and running..

Went from this :

To the one you are[no longer] seeing now..

There are a lot of good resources out there about how to customize your blog.

Furthermore, there are plenty of nice widgets and templates, saving you both time and effort.

Instead of using these prebuilt resources, I wanted to learn a bit more, mainly about the Blogger API’s and capabilities, and of course enjoy some jQuery action.

I embarked upon on a small RTFM on the Blogger advanced help, fired up Boks and here’s the result..

Here’s a short list of the tools I’ve used to customize this blog:

I’ll post more about each tool later on..

BluePrintCSS

An excellent CSS framework that saves SO MUCH cross browser tests

Boks

A suberb tool created in Adobe Air, which allows you to visually build up the layout of your page using the BluePrintCSS framework

jQuery

A javascript framework which is very easy to use, and incredibly extendible

jQuery Tooltip plugin

A Tooltip plugin for jQuery, hover over the twitter icon below to see in action..

jQuery UI

CSS Themes and some really sweet javascript UI tools based on jQuery

Free RSS Icons by Matthew Inman

Great free kit of rss icons (and a rather cool site)

That’s it for now,

Erik