Google Launches New Blogger Template Designer

In the beginning of March 2010, Blogger has introduced a new feature called Template Designer. Blogger platform is mostly popular among newcomer bloggers. As soon as they mature, they understand the significant limitations Blogger has. One of these limitations, and a really big one, was the fairly limited amount and quality of the built-in templates. Therefore, you could see multiple twin blogs on the Web cooked in the same kitchen of the limited fantasy of the Blogger designers. The new development can change the situation and give Blogger a strong competitive advantage over the rivals.

According to Google, this tool will significantly broaden the ability of users to modify the look of their blog. This Blogger Template Designer includes ready-to-use professional designs, pre-built templates that can be further modified, a color-adjustment control to tweak the blog's color palette, stock photos for background use and an advanced interface for publishers who know HTML and CSS.

Main Features of the new Blogger Template Designer Tool


1. Templates

This feature allows you to choose from 15 predesigned templates split into four families: Simple, Picture Window, Awesome Inc, and Watermark. Each of the templates can be arranged with 1, 2, or 3 column layouts, complete control over the size and arrangement of the columns, and different background color scheme.

2. Background

As the name of this feature you can adjust and change the background color of your blog template. You can choose from variety of images uploaded on iStockPhoto. In advanced mode you can also customize the color of special elements.

3. Layout

Here you can adjust the columns of your body. You can make a 2 or 3 column sidebar floating to the left or right. You can also customize the width of your blog. You can also make your footer 1 column 2 columns, or 3 columns.

4. Advanced Design

This is the most important and advanced feature as in this feature you can customize the look, color, style of each and every element on your blog including blog title, blog description, post title, post footer, gadgets, images, etc.

To use this feature you have to first log into http://drafts.blogger.com. Than navigate to layouts and click on template designer (you can see in the bellow image).

Video Presentation of the new capabilities:

New Blogger Template Designer 2010

Sources and Additional Information:

http://bestbloggerwidgets.blogspot.com/2010/03/blogger-new-features-template-designer.html

http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2010/03/blogger-template-designer.html

http://blogger.com/templates

How to Fix Blogger Errors while Uploading New Templates

When you start your blogging adventure, you are so many things to learn, so at the first steps of your blogging career you just use basic templates available on the Blogger website. As time goes, you realize the limitations of the basic offerings and disadvantage that your site interface looks like thousand other basic blogs. There are some limited opportunities to tweak the HTML code of your template, but do you really want to mess with it? If you are not sure, just search online for “Blogger Free Templates” and you get many offerings to choose from. New template loading is easy and does not require any coding experience. If… everything goes smoothly. But if not, you are trapped. In this post, I will present the approach to resolve the typical templates loading errors to the Blogger interface.

Sample of these BX error codes are:

• bx-bliced
  
• bX-ev85ll
  
• bX-39cc9q
  
• bX-y6cz0v
  
• bX-982020

There are the following steps recommended for the problem resolution:

1. First of all, try to upload your new template in the Layout>Edit HTML section of your dashboard. Not all templates have been affected by this issue, so it is advisable to check before attempting to edit your template manually. If you do receive a bX-error code when trying to upload your template, you should proceed to step 2.
   
2. If your new template is an XML file (with the .xml intension), browse to where this is located on your computer and right click the file. Choose to open with Notepad (or your favorite basic text editor). If your template is contained within a text file (for you to copy and paste into the template editor), simply open this with your text editor.
   
3. Search for every instance of b:widget id= in your template, for example:
   
4. • b:widget id=’Header1’
     
   • b:widget id=’Blog1’
     
   • b:widget id=’Label1’
     
   • b:widget id=’HTML1’

Replace each of these IDs with the next number up. For example, Header1 should become Header2; Blog1 should become Blog2, HTML3 should become HTML4 and so on.

4. Once you have changed each and every instance of widget id to a different number, you should save the template under a slightly different file name (to be aware of your altered file). If this is an XML file, be sure to save with the XML extension.
   
5. Now you have made these changes, attempt to upload your file again in the Layout>Edit HTML section of your Blogger dashboard. Now you should not receive the error code and will be able to upload your template.

Note. If after following these steps you are still unable to upload your revised template, it is worthwhile to close your browser and delete all temporary internet files and cookies. Then restart your browser and try to upload again. Clearing all of these temporary files from your browser will ensure you receive a fresh page when editing your template. The reason why the bx-XXXX error occurs when you upload a template is because the Blogger developers changed the way template editor accepts certain third party code. They have seen a lot of data corruption due to ’bad templates’.

Now, with these advices, I know exactly what to do, when error pops-up. Before, if that happened, I just switched back, choosing the basic template from Blogger database, ensured that the basic template works, and than tried again to load a new template. In most cases, that worked, but sometimes I needed to repeat the procedure twice. Now I can understand, why the problem could be resolved by these actions.