When I first started blogging it was a slow process. I signed up in Jan of 2005. But didnt really figure out how blogging worked. I wondered who would actually know about a little html page which in plain and simple 10 point Ariel font said
"Hi"
Then Balaji told me about his blog and how the thing is purely "word of mouth" publicity and this is the same things as the homepages we used to maintain as graduate students.
Then I slowly started exploring the other tabs on blogger, instead of being restricted to the Posting tab ! Then the exasperation started. Having leant HTML as soon as it became public domain (1993) and having graduated slowly to HTML3, my web authoring skills were impressive till about 1995-1996 and I had one of the few fancy homepages in my Department at College. Still remember those NCSA telnet days and the birth of Netscape, Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos just to name a few.
Then came "Javascript".. my nemesis. Gone were those easy days of just adding a few tags and changing things on different frames ! You had to learn coding now to keep on par with those other fancy web authors.. That was probably the single event that made me close that page and contend myself to be just another happy surfer !
I still tried to keep pace once in a while, trying to add scripts to have things scroll at the bottom bar or have windows pop up with a userid and password. But it was too taxing for me. I didnt want to go back to school, just to fancy up my webpage.
Now I am back to square one.. except my copy paste skills have improved significantly and I am more determined to give this blog a nicer look and feel. This, especially after I saw Praveen's page with the collapsible menus !! I have been trying to figure out how to do this for a few days and then I got a windfall. Nikhil Raghuram, my friends son, showed up at home one day and he showed me how to do this in three simple steps..
So, now this blog is a work in progress !! If you noticed, the "My cooking" link in the sidebar is now a collapsible menu. I have also been designing my own link buttons for the categories.. here are some of them..
Note that the O's are actually a plate of noodles cooked by yours truly !!
Now I have to work on getting these in the page.. Since I am limited to an hour or so of blogging every day, I will focus on improving the template this week.. The posting and commenting will have to take a backseat for now..Stay tuned !!