In just a few more days, May 10 to be exact, I will celebrate the 4th year of Rick and Paulette’s RV Travels. That, assuming I post for 3 more days, will mark my 1,442nd consecutive post without ever having missed a day of blogging. I’m not sure if this deserves some kind of an award, or a fully-paid visit with a shrink to diagnose a treatment for Compulsive, Obsessive, Blogging Syndrome.
I didn’t really like any of these Blogger Template choices
To help celebrate this addictive behavior, I’ve decided to make a change to my trusty old Blogging Template. I’m doing this mainly because Blogger no longer supports my original, heavily customized 2004 Blogger Rounders Template. I wasn’t even aware of this until last week when I went to my Dashboard and tried to make a few custom changes to the format like column widths and even a change to the sidebar – nope, not allowed and not supported! Time for a change!
I finally chose a Simple Template to start with and then customized it
It wasn’t time, however, for me to go all crazy with bells, whistles and a dizzying kaleidoscope of colors. I wanted to keep my blog simple and minimalist as possible. Blogger offers a variety of templates in categories named Simple, Picture Window, Awesome, Watermark, Etheral and Travel. After considerable experimentation, I chose what else – Simple with just 2 columns, the main blog body and 1 sidebar.
Again, I didn’t really care for any of the stock custom color themes
Blogger’s Simple Template offered 7 basic color schemes – none of which I liked. I chose the Simple template with a light blue image background that would allow me to select and change the colors for each element (i.e. main body, outer body and sidebar columns). The first thing I did was to remove the Template’s Background Image thus allowing me to replace the light blue with my familiar navy blue. I also got rid of the sickly green on my old top sidebar and made the new one plain white. I decided on just one long sidebar for my new blog.
After selecting the ‘blue’ theme, I set about customizing the backgrounds
The reason I went with white backgrounds for the body and sidebar was because of it’s clean, simple look. I find a white background is easy on my eyes for reading and I suppose that’s why newspapers, books and magazines are printed on white paper. I also like a white background for displaying my photos because I find my eyes are naturally drawn to the color in the images and not distracted by any dark type of background surrounding them. As a result, the overall look and feel of my new template may seem immaterial to most readers, but I like it.
Maximum image width using my old template
Maximum image width using my new template
Perhaps the biggest change in this new template is that my photos will now display with a default width of 520px rather than just 420px. Blogger does a lousy job of compression with all of our images so the larger the image the better the quality on the blog. One only has to enlarge a blog photo to realize what a difference a bigger image makes. Other than these visible changes everything else about my new template is “under the hood”. The new Blogger Dashboard now includes some neat tools for customizing and tweaking templates.
Backed up to the recycle bin at the garbage dump and ready to unload
Yesterday, I was up to my hips in yard clippings, garbage and manure!! But, before I could tackle any of those wonderful tasks I had to take care of one small item – getting new license tags for our 8’ utility trailer as the old license expired December 31st. It’s a good thing I happened to spot that or I could have been in for a big fine if I’d been caught. So, first thing, I headed into town to an ICBC agent and paid $44 for new tags.
20 bags of ‘fine manure’ for Paulette’s Rose Gardens
After putting the tags on, I loaded up a bunch of green garbage bags, hitched up the utility trailer and I was off to the garbage dump with Molly and Rylie acting as supervisors. It was another hot, summer like day here with temperatures well up into the 70’s. On the way home, I stopped at Walmart to pick up 20 bags of manure for Paulette’s Rose Gardens. It was on sale for $2 a bag. After getting home, we unloaded the manure bags and I headed for the showers!
With the great weather we’ve had, the farmer’s are already making hay!
Later in the afternoon, we took Molly and Rylie over to Cobble Hill Mountain for an afternoon hike in the cool shade of the tall Cedar and Fir trees lining the trail.
It was nice and cool in the shade of the forest yesterday afternoon
It was a nice, cool relief from the blazing afternoon sun. We climbed up as far as the Water Tower which is just enough to get our blood pumping without over doing it. One day soon, I know Paulette is going to want to go all the way up to the top. After getting back home, we still had a little over an hour before dinner so that was just enough time for me and the muttzo’s to enjoy a quick siesta after our hard day of hauling garbage, yard cuttings and manure.
Have a great Tuesday, and thanks again for visiting!
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