Stupid Google! (and some HTML resources)

Dear Google: Your Dynamic layout series is wonderful, in many respects. It is interactive, reader-friendly, and attractive. However, there is one major problem: The inability to change the HTML coding stifles creativity, and seems to go against the philosophy of Google itself. I hope you will fix this problem. In the meantime, I am sadly restricted to one of your lesser templates, simply because it affords me the ability to customize my pages. Were it not for my followers (however few they may be), I would consider changing blogging platforms. For now, though, I will hold out hope for your listening to the many complaints online about this omission in your template design. Sincerely, Lorien Menhennett mybedsidemanner.blogspot.com

For those of you who may have visited my blog in the last few days, you may have noticed that it has been a revolving door of layouts and templates. For this, I apologize. I realize this can be disorienting and confusing to readers ... I know it is to the author.

The reason for this is as follows: I found a very wonderful template, called the Dynamic series. However, I wanted to customize it by changing the HTML coding. After about an hour of frustration on both my blog and other blogs dedicated to helping bloggers blog, I discovered that this template series does not allow you to edit the HTML code. It is fixed, so to speak. I find this very frustrating. Hence my faux open letter to Google in my faux version of The New York Times (at right).

I find it humorous that this was a problem for me (at 5 a.m. on a Saturday, especially). I never would have dreamed that I would be editing HTML code. But I have learned bits and pieces of it, through different Web sites and others' blogs. This post is a shout-out to those of you who are experts at this foreign language, which I am slowly learning. This post is also a complaint to Google for not making it possible to speak this language in the Dynamic template series, which aside from this issue is pretty darn cool.

With that said, here are two sites I have found helpful in learning HTML code. Just in case, ya know, you want to try it out too ...

http://www.quackit.com/html/
This site is great. It offers tons of code HTML code resources. One of my favorite things about this site is that it has "code generators." I know, I know ... the purists will call me lazy, but I really like that I can just specify the number of columns, rows, background color, etc. in a table and have the site churn out the whole table's code for me, which I can then copy and paste into my blog. (Here is the specific table generator link: http://www.quackit.com/html/html_table_generator.cfm.)

http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com
There are blogs about everything. Including blogs about blogging. This is a great one if you need tips on technical things (I have found it quite useful).