My template conversion

I'm taking the template plunge... or maybe using a plunger to unplug a clogged blog.

I decided since I was having problems working with the classic template (mainly in the "About Me" profile area) after upgrading to Blogger 2.0 (despite the promised premise that nothing would change, everything would work fine) to just take the full plunge and convert the template itself to a version that should work with the new Blogger standard. It's supposed to allow one to move and change page elements much more easily and so far that does indeed seem to be the case in general, but I have a lot more stuff to try. Right off the bat, though, it looks like it won't let me change the overall background color to black like I had it before. It will let me change individual page element (or section) background colors, but not the overall background—so it didn't take long to find one limitation already. Maybe I'll yet figure out how to do it, though, or find something in the help pages even though the odds of finding actual help in the help pages seem somewhat steep in my experience.

Anyway, they do warn up front that you will lose any custom changes you've done to the classic template so at least it's not a huge surprise like no longer being able to use HTML in the "About Me" section. This conversion means that I now have to gradually try to phase back in as many of those changes as can while I simultaneously learn how to work with some of the new features. This could take some time and I probably won't blog anything new until I'm satisfied either that my tweaking is complete or that the things I want to implement are not really doable after all. If the latter turns out to be the case, I will probably just chuck the new template stuff altogether and revert to the classic one. It may be slightly harder to work with, but on the other hand I pretty much had it formatted how I wanted. Wish me luck.