Lo, I am being thwarted

I spent the better part of two hours (two!) last night trying and failing utterly (utterly I say!) to change the template on my blog. (And for any PTB reading this, please note, that was two hours at home on my own time and therefore perfectly reasonable.) I found scads of free templates but downloading them proved problematical. Apparently blogger prefers .xml to .html. So I found .xml templates. And then discovered uploading them wiped my widgets (which I'd only found with Sonia's help--Thanks Sonia!), profiles, and all sorts of things. Grrrr. Arrggghhh.

No worries, I said to myself. (After I'd removed my head from my desk where I'd been repeatedly thumping it.) I used to mess around with webpages in my misspent youth (that would be my late twenties, for anyone keeping track). I'll just take a peak at the source code and cut and paste to my heart's content. Woe! It would appear .xml is more...complicated than what I'm used to. I can't even recognize where the various elements begin and end in the code. This is going to be more of a challenge than I'd originally anticipated.

I'm missing livejournal at the moment. For me, it was much easier to set up and manipulate the journal than it is this blog. I couldn't even format my userpic properly--the source file was too big, and nothing I could do on my dinosaur desktop could make it sufficiently small enough to appease blogger. For those of you keeping track at home, I emailed it to a friend in Seattle (Hey, look, I've got a toolbox after all!) who did something sneaky with it using his Mac (all the while pointing out the vastly superior nature of all things Mac to PC, I might add) and mailed it back to me.

So my challenge for the next week during Learning 2.0 hiatus is to learn more about how blogger works and rather than creating actual content (Content? We don't need no stinking content!) change the look of this blog a bit. After all, it's not how you feel...it's how you look.

Stay tuned as I scour blogger's helpfiles in an attempt to learn new tricks, solve the puzzle that is .xml, and solve that great mystery of the universe: "What is a widget, anyway, and do I really need it in this blog?"