Thursday, June 18, 2009

A New Look

The New Look of A Shroud of Thoughts


For those of you who frequent this blog, you may notice it has a new look. I finally found a three column template that works with Blogger's new layouts. This allows me to take advantage of all the new gadgets while keeping the traditional three columns that A Shroud of Thoughts has had for most of its history. The only problem I have found is the placement of my ads. There seems to be no way of placing the ads above the header, as I once had them. For now I have placed them at the bottom, hardly an ideal solution. If anyone can think of a way to place the ads above the header, please let me know. I do not want ads in the sidebars or after every post!

If any one of you have difficulty reading the entries in the new look, please let me know. While I'd like to keep the black colour scheme (this is A Shroud of Thoughts, after all), I can change the font colour to a theoretically easier to read white. I realise that many of us are getting on in years and can sometimes have trouble reading text if there isn't a good deal of contrast!

For those of you who might wonder where I got this template, I got it from Free XML Blogger Template - 3 Column Minima. As might be expected I have made a few modifications. I changed the font to the blog's traditional Georgia (except for Helvetica and its variants, I never cared much for san serif fonts), removed the ads and labels in the right sidebar (I have no real use for labels...), and placed my various links in the left and right sidebars and the archive in the left. A new addition is the Followers box, which is in the right sidebar. With the classic template I never could use it!

On a historical note, this is the first time I have made significant changes to the look of the blog since March 25, 2005 (which was sadly also the day that Beverly Hillbillies creator Paul Henning died). I still have that template and screen shots for my future anniversary posts!

Guest Bloggers Wanted

In honour of the blog's fifth anniversary, I still have an open invitation to anyone who wants to make a guest post to A Shroud of Thoughts. If you would like to be a guest blogger, you can email me at the handy dandy email link in the right hand column. If for whatever reason the link at the right does not work, then email me at either mercurie at gmail.com or spacelord at warpdriveonline.com. I only have a few ground rules:

1. The post must be on some facet of pop culture. This is not as narrow as it sounds, because it includes everything from movies to literature (by my definition, Shakespeare is pop culture). Have a favourite actor or writer you want to profile, a favourite book or TV show? Those topics are ideal for this blog's focus.

2. Please, keep all posts rated PG-13 at the most. I will not say A Shroud of Thoughts is a family blog, but I am fully aware that children might be reading it.

3. Given the fact that I can be long winded, a guest blogger's post can be fairly long, but not so long that it must be posted over several different entries. I am the only one who gets to write series of articles here!

4. If you want pictures included with your post, please email them to me!

3 comments:

poppedculture said...

Nicely done - I need to get on that myself. I'd like a three column too, perhaps with a wider centre if possible. I look where you found yours.

Toby O'B said...

I like the new look, Merc, and I'm one who could have problems reading sites. So it's fine so far as I know.

Terence Towles Canote said...

Thanks for the kind words, Jeremy and Toby. And thanks for letting me know that it isn't hard to read, Toby!