Just read a great article at coding horror on becoming a good blogger. It says that it takes at least a year to even get noticed and main peace of advice is to keep punching and feel good about it. Well, it sounds… hmmm… encouraging. Thanks God I’m not aiming that high. Anyways, I decided to follow advice and throw a punch – even though my new shiny theme for BlogEngine is not quite ready yet and I was hoping this will be my next subject. Funny how it goes – takes about an hour to convert any CSS template into BlogEngine theme, this is how simple it is and how good ASP.NET overall and BlogEngine in particular implemented skinning. Almost too good to be true – and it isn’t. Dirty little secret is that it takes ten times more to polish it to the dissent “production” state, when it looks good in all major browsers and scales fine for reasonable range of screen resolutions. I’ve heard that there are about ten testers for every developer in Microsoft – totally makes sense!
Although theme is a work in progress, I put it live on this site and you can look at it here. It is techy looking, with a mark of web 2.0-ishness, dark skin that I called Dark Blog. It originated from "DkBlog" – free CSS template good folks at Free CSS Templates put online to teach people how to create web pages that don’t suck – thanks, guys! It is not downloadable yet, needs some clean-up and few things need to be added, but for the most part it already looks ok. The plan is to build downloadable package no later than this weekend, so if you’ll notice anything weird about it please let me know and I’ll try to fix it right before prime time. Oh, and don’t forget to check out dynamic horizontal menu it uses – I’ve spent some time (and two previous posts) on the damn thing!
