Blog Template Customization

I am not 100 percent satisfied with the layout of any of the templates for my blog. Hacking the XHTML/XML file is difficult and not possible to edit with a WYSIWYG editor.

I could make my blog in a web hosting server with its own domain from scratch and there are many tools to do this. However, the changes that I need are very minor. I really like to add more separate blogs within the same blog like in other websites but in blogger, you can only have one "Blog Archive" widget. Another thing I'd like to have is 3 columns. This could look busy but I would like to have one really small column on the left, the main blog column in the middle, and a third column on the right for ads. Having the third column is not that important but having another blog element is.

There is a blogging website for those that like to customize their template and it offered a template for a 3 column template which I will play around with later. This site is http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com and I think it is a great site although a bit busy, I didn't care. It is loaded with great information I will probably use in the future.

Although I couldn't find the answer to creating another blog archive page element, I did get ideas for making it look like there are multiple blog archives.

I have two work arounds:

1. I could blog as I normally do and mix the topics of my discussion. For example, the focus is making a journal of my animated film. Intersperse are other random thoughts.

I can have another page element, like a html link or directory and make it point to a specific blog title in the blog archive element.

2. I could use the page element described in #1 and make the links point to another separate blog. This would look a lot cleaner and more organized but the downside is that I will end up with many separate blog sites. It may not be too bad since I can access all the blogs from within blogger.com.