'The Yard' has been fenced!

I don't understand why Blogger doesn't have templates with three columns in it!!! Personally, I like the three column templates because they fill up the screen nicely (the two column ones leave out a lot of space on the sides and I don't quite like that). Besides, having three columns means you can add more gadgets to your blog - on the left sidebar, on the right sidebar. This saves the length of the blog page because with two sidebars you can actually shorten it by distributing gadgets on both sides of the blog.

For close to three years I've been filling my 'yard' with my posts, adding gadgets and some tools which I found interesting. But deep down, I always wanted a third column because the length of my blog page was increasing steadily.

Then, thanks to my dear friend Sachin Tewari, who blogs at www.sachintewari.blogspot.com, told me about the three column template. I google'd, and found just what I was looking for at http://www.blogspottutorial.com/. Following the instructions on the site, I downloaded the ZIP file, extracted the XML and got ready to update my blog's template.

I was advised by Sachin to backup my blog, in case I didn't like the new template. I did, and out came another XML which has been saved on my system. So I went to my blog's dashboard and uploaded the new XML. There was a catch, however.

The catch was that all the gadgets installed over the years would be deleted - permanently - on installing the new template. I didn't know what to do. I loved my gadgets, some I'd found after a lot of searching on the Net. Anyways, I decided to go ahead and install new gadgets instead. 'The Yard' now had a three column template!

It took me a while to get the color combinations right in the new template. And some more time in finding and adding gadgets to the new template. I was more worried about this particular tool that I use, called "CBox". What this tool does is it allows your blog visitors to leave comments. I have collected some comments over the last year, so I was worried that they'd be gone when I installed CBox again. However, that was not to be! I logged in to CBox using my credentials and Voila! All my comments were intact! It was just a matter of adding the tool to my blog, and it would look like it never left it! Brilliant!

The Blogger "Video Bar" gadget is strange, however. Even though I've given the URL to my YouTube channel, I was still needed to give a keyword and only then were my videos displayed in the bar. If that was not enough, the videos don't show up all the time - sometimes a "Refresh" is needed to do that! Strange!

Anyways, 'The Yard' is still being built. I'm still contemplating if I should add some of the old gadgets, or not.

As of now, the left sidebar has all the info regarding the blog itself, and that is the intention going forward. The right sidebar is for other miscellaneous stuff. That's the simplest layout I could think of, otherwise managing a bigger blog can definitely get cluttery!!!

So go ahead, take a stroll in the fenced (by two sidebar columns) 'Yard'.

So long!