Blogger stats just got easier

I saw this post on Mashable this morning and checked my tabs in Blogger. Sure enough there's a new tab! So, what do I see? I can check page views, traffic sources and where my audience is located (by country). I can also see which posts have been viewed most recently. Mashable points out that this new feature doesn't have everything a power blogger needs, but, for right now, it works for me. The graphic interface is easy for me to follow.

Another redesign for the blog

You might have noticed that this blog has gone through another resign. Last year's redesign was because I was tired of the old look and wanted something more lively and fresh. I had to go to a template outside of Blogger to get what I wanted. I felt like I really accomplished something because I was able to go in to the HTML and make changes that I wanted without breaking the template. Exciting stuff.

Yesterday, Melanie Holtsman posted a link to Draft Blogger on Twitter. I didn't even know about Draft Blogger, but I played around for awhile and here you have the result. Draft Blogger has additional templates with greater flexibility and more modern design. Read the blog post about the changes and how to get them on your blog.

The question is, why go through another redesign? Well [insert sheepish look here], I had trouble reading my own blog. I found the contrast between the text and the background was too stark and the overall size of the font too small. Sometimes the letters blended together. I wear glasses and have for years, but I was concerned that if I was having trouble, others might be as well.

The grays and blues are more soothing to my eyes (and I hope yours too). The borders around each post nicely package the entry. I noticed that I need to add more visuals to the blog (this has always been a problem, but it seems more apparent now) and I will continue to tweak the design a bit (for examples, the subhead needs to be a little darker). My goal though, is to keep it simple and easy on the eyes.

What do you think?

Fresh, New Look for Summer

I can't believe I did this!

I've never really liked the standard templates at Blogger, but figured I had no other choice since I don't know HTML. However, I recently ran across an article on Mashable about new templates just for Blogger. I find them to be interesting and exciting, but still...

I've been playing around with this template, Plantilla Blogy-O2, from Blog and Web, for the past few days using a blog that I have here at Blogger, but haven't used in quite some time. I couldn't do everything I wanted to do, but I'm liking the way it looks.

Overall, the only real area of difficulty was the header. I ended up deleting the image that was there and added in a new image created using Twitlogo. I used the advanced settings to match the color in the background and made it shrink to fit in the Blogger settings when I uploaded it.

So, what do you think?