Making Blogger Page my Front Page

You will notice a few cosmetic changes to this blog over the past couple of days. After a little thought, I decided that I might as well make this blog the main index page for http://www.blueskyworkshop.com. I was using the Google Ajax proxy to redisplay the posts, which is a little slow. So in there end, there was only a couple of differences between this page and that one.



You will notice a Google search bar for my site has been added to the bottom of the page. In addition, on the top right, some site wide navigation links along with topical links to my how-to's have been added.



Blogger allows you to totally tweak the CSS for your blog. Notice I have changed the Link List boxes in the right sidebar. The light blue background and the border makes them stand out a bit more. There is also now a ruler after each post to give each entry a little more separation.



In addition, I dropped the Amazon MP3 widget and Adsense skyscraper ad from the right sidebar as well. They seemed to be slowing down the page loading a bit. Instead, I have opted to insert an ad inline after every other post. I think this will provide more focused ads without affecting usability or performance.



In the end, http://blueskyworkshop.blogspot.com, http://blueskyworkshop.com, and http://blueskyworkshop.com/blog are all going to point to the same blogger page. I thought about removing the last URL in the list, but I see no harm in leaving it. If I take it out, I might break links to it, which I don't want to do.



The more I work with it, the more I like Blogger as a tool. The folks at Google have made a really useful, easy to use tool. It scales well for power users like me. Often tools like this are useless because they are crippled and can not be extended or modified. I am so glad I am using this and not upgrading Wordpress every other month. Woo hoo!