New style

After what seems like an eternity with the old ready-made style, have finally gotten down and dirty with Blogger's internals. The inspiration was Gmail's message display interface, which also led me to suggest such an interface for the next version of Thunderbird in the website maintained by the developers, here. Also led me to thinking about how to implement something like it with HTML. Plucked up some courage reading up on JavaScript, the DOM, and CSS, then gave it a try; rather aborted results can be seen here.

Then realised that Blogger's template system provides pseudo-HTML tags which automatically pull blog posts and comments out of the Blogger database -- so basically we have this big database of items which we can pull out and display, rather as if they were emails. Of course, they're a little more complicated than emails (because each post can have one or more comments), which leads to some code complexity; but on the whole it was surprisingly easy. Guess I have XML/CSS/JavaScript and their amazing expressiveness to thank for that.

One thing to note though is that the site doesn't work very well at all on Internet Explorer, even the version 6 that I have running on this XP Service Pack 2 machine. Tried a perfunctory hack to solve the problem, but hasn't worked. Oh well, will tackle it later, I guess. Meanwhile, I recommend all my beloved viewers (anybody out there? :-) use Firefox or Opera, the two best browsers available today.