Setting up the blog (part 1)

Hey everyone!

This weekend, I've been experimenting quite a bit with the layout. I tried out lots of stuff, so I thought "I'll just write my first entry about it, so people know how Area42 came into life!" :)

Dynamic Views, and why I eventually chose not to use them
I noticed that Blogger has something called "Dynamic Views", and frankly, I love the idea! It looks fresh and clean, it loads fast, and it's "new". And I love new stuff on the internet! The readers can choose to look at your blog the way they like. Just watch the video if you want to know what I'm talking about. :)

It's just too bad that it's not really "finished" yet. It doesn't support a lot of gadgets/widgets, and almost no customization. I liked it so much though, that I decided to give it a try. I did some research, and found a site with some nice "hacks" to make the Dynamic Views a bit better: Southern Speakers.
It has a lot of nice tutorials for Blogger, so I guess I'll be spending some time here. ;-)

Anyway, after doing some tweaks to the layout, I wanted to add some plugins/extensions/widgets/whatever you call it... But it didn't work :(

Basic Blogger after all
So yeah, I wasted some time trying to polish my blog for Dynamic Views, but it just didn't have the features that I wanted yet. I reverted back to a basic theme, tweaked it, and added two major plugins:

• ShareThis: the share buttons that appear on the bottom of each blog post
• LinkWithin: this one shows the "You might also like..." on the bottom.

I think these features are pretty important, so that's why I don't use Dynamic Views for now.
In the meantime...
Since I'm a fan of Dynamic Views, and I want to encourage people to try it out, I put a link on top of the blog to see Area42 in Dynamic Views. Unfortunately, the layout is just the default, but still, just to discover the "new" internet, click it ;-)

Just a little screenshot of what Area42 looks like now,
for future nostalgic reasons :p

More tweaks to come!
Since I just love tweaking and design, you may expect more :D Still to come: a nice header file, another background, small visual tweaks and cool features I may stumble upon.

For now: good bye! I still have some work to do for my exam on Thursday ;-)

Greetz,

x Marcia