sean.blog Updated

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UPDATE: Due to a problem getting connected to the right account in Feedburner, the Feedburner feed has changed for this site.  If you subscribe to the Feedburner feed you will need to update your subscription.  Sorry about that, and I hope to get my 30 readers back some day. 


I came across an article earlier today on the Blogger Buzz blog about Blogger themes. I had been wanting to make some changes around the blog so I decided to take on the task this evening. After a few false starts with templates that looked like they would be good but turned out to be not so much so, I am ready to roll with the new site and new theme. By the way I settled on the Thesis Theme for Blogger from Deluxe Templates which is apparently a dirivative of a theme that was once done for Wordpress.

If you read my site via RSS stop by the site and see the new design. I have tried to clean things up a little bit and make use of the Social Bar gadget from Google Friend Connect. I made a few changes/additions to the default template I downloaded:

1. Friend Connect: You can grab all sorts of Google Friend Connect gadgets from the home page. What's nice with Blogger is that all the setup is already done. You just need to copy and paste some code into the Blogger template.
2. Added a Favicon: This is a three part process. First, head over to http://www.genfavicon.com/ and create the Favicon you want to use. Once you have the icon you need to find a place to store it, I suggest creating a site on Google Sites and uploading the file there. Finally, you need to add one line of code in your template, you can find the instructions here.
3. Swapped comments to Disqus: This is so easy. Sign up with Disqus's commenting service and follow the options there to setup comments for your blogger blog. What they have you do is download your full template and upload it to there site. They make some changes and give you an updated template which you paste back into Blogger. Easy peasy and you have a very nice commenting system.
4. Added a Creative Commons License: Head over to the Creative Commons site and click the license link to get started. They ask a few quick questions and give you a few buttons you can add to your site. Grab the code they offer and paste it into your footer.

I changed around a few widgets and all was done. I have been very happy with how easy it is to modify a Blogger blog and end up with something that does not really look like a blog on Blogger. Let me know what you think.