More Layout Changes

After seeing how easy it is to tweak my Blogger template, I thought I'd get a little more adventurous. I wanted to push the masthead up into the lefthand corner of the browser window, add a third column to my layout, and, lastly, I've wanted a way to display recent comments to my posts for a long time.

Moving the masthead was just something I toyed around with in the CSS of the template until I achieved the effect I wanted. It only took a few minutes. I'm enjoying the flexibility of Blogger that I previously had not thought was available.

Adding the third column (technically a second sidebar in Blogger-speak) was quite easy thanks to a very nice tutorial from the Beautiful Beta blog. I'm pleased with the results of this addition. Adding the third column is useful to me because I now can add a little bit more content for the reader without requiring any additional scrolling. Most importantly, I've been looking for a way to display recent comments to my posts. What I like about this feature on other blogs is the manner in which this lets the reader follow any conversations that are taking place about a given post. I also took advantage of this new "real estate" by moving my Twitter Updates widget from the left column over to the right.

In order to make sure that both Twitter Updates and recent comments are visible without scrolling, I tweaked the script for both widgets to reduce the number of items displayed and I also changed the script for the comments widget to display only the first 75 characters of any comment. Lastly, I reduced the font size in the third column altogether both to fit more content on the screen without scrolling and to de-emphasize this content relative to the blog posts.

I had two comments on my last post in which I "unveiled" my first round of layout changes. One commenter liked my "keep it simple" approach and the other thought I made better use of "real estate". I hope I didn't turn around and violate either of these improvements through the addition of more content...