Assessment #1

Ok, I have 5 posts on my blog so far. A link to an 'interesting' one is here. I haven't done much to the look of the blog, just played with the layout a little, changed some fonts and text colours around, thats about it. I've made a couple of comments on other people's blogs, not really too interesting, but here is a link to one. I haven't tagged any of my posts, as I forgot to do so after having published most of my posts from Google Documents, where it doesn't give you the option of adding tags. Thats about all I've done with blogger.

I have 24 pages bookmarked on my del.icio.us account, which mostly made up of other people's blogs, and Flickr accounts, but I've also added a bunch of my favourite sites. The sites that I have added, apart from all the blogs and what not, are sites that I visit regularly, and like to keep up to date with. My 3 favourite sites are Kotaku, AbsolutePunk and PALGN.

I have 34 photos uploaded on my Flickr account, which are all my own, from a period of time from early last year, to early this year. My 3 favourites are here, here and here.

Blogger Templates

You can pretty much change everything in the template options of blogger... if you know how they work. Since its not a normal style sheet, it can be a little tricky when playing with the code of the template as things like text colours, fonts and background images are controlled by variables and then called upon in the CSS. But you can change everything about the look of your blog in the template code, from the fonts used, text colour, link colours, background colours and images, and even the layout of the page, but that would require some major recoding.

The only thing I changed on my template was the blog title colour, from the light brown colour it originally was, to black. Not much, but I like it and it was simple to do.

CSS

There are a number of advantages to using CSS.

It allows you to separate the design from the content of the webpage, which allows you to create much cleaner websites. You can use it to control more than one design element at once, so you can say that all the headings are a certain colour and font, but if you want to change that later on, all you have to do is change the code in the CSS and it will change all the other pages controlled by that style sheet.

CSS also allows the designer to implement more than one page design for a website with the use of exteranal style sheets. So you could have the one website, with the same content, but with completely different designs, you can also allow the user to change the style sheet.

It also useful with accessibility, as the CSS is different from the actual content of the webpage, it makes it easier for accessibility programs, such as readers, to view the webpage.