I'm ready to migrate

UPDATE (11:31am, 19 Sept): The migration process is complete. My old template will soon fade into memory. But if things go wrong, it's just a command away.:)

TWENTY posts and two weeks after launching my test blog, I have created a superior three-column template for this weblog, based on Jason Sutter's Jellyfish. (See screenshot.)

That test blog (as can be seen from its subtitle) is intended to see if Blogger Beta can live up to its hype. My conclusion: it can, even in the hands of an HTML tyro like me. In those 14 days, I learned some tricks about cascading style sheets (CSS), enough to create that template, aided mostly by the good ol' trial-and-error approach made painless by the "Preview" and "Clear Edits" function in Blogger Beta.

The new template now has the capability to do post categories, powered by the new Labels function under Blogger Beta. It has some visually appealing bells and whistles I discovered and implemented along the way: a colored background for quotes (which now have more generous space around them); a more understated dotted blue line beneath hyperlinks instead of the regular straight line, and the same color background when the mouse pointer hovers above them; post titles that are underlined and color highlighted when hovered about; and a dotted gray line separating the body text from the footer.

Boxing these, of course, is the neater, two-sidebar layout where my links occupy the left while the rest of my chosen page elements (the "About Me" text block, the "Recently" list of posts through site feed, my Categories, Archives and a javascript link for Technocrati) are lined up, right-justified, to the right.

Who says an old dog can't learn new tricks? :)