Friday, July 31, 2009

New Blogger 3 column Sweet Dreams template

Amanda of BloggerBuster have created a number of New Blogger templates. However, please note that the templates uses many images hosted by Amanda, and when you download her templates, included also will be the images. This is like implying that you should upload those images to the web yourself, get the URL's and substitute them in the relevant parts of the templates. This may be because she don't want you to increase the bandwidth load from her site. In any case, it is probably wise for you to upload the images yourself as then these images will be controlled by you and not Amanda. If Amanda remove the images from the web or her site goes offline, the images in your blog will disappear.

Amanda's templates have some features very much different from the other templates including a Lable (category or tag) List in the form of a Label Cloud, animated or fixed gif images, widgets to add a mp3 music player plus a mp3 music file, search box, etc.

However, I have noticed that after downloading her templates, some don't include the images (Blues) and some have some missing images. However, this is no problem as I will show you how to get the images, upload them to the web, get the URL's and substitute these with the the relevant URL's in the template. If you want to depend on Amanda, you can skip all those explanation, just download, backup your current template PLUS the Page Elements, upload her template and just forget about the rest. However, she has indicated that she prefer you to host your own files and images. If you want control over the images yourself and you don't know how, then you will have to read my instructions on how to get the missing images, upload the neccessary images and files plus get their URL's.

I will start with one of her template and explain the process fully, and the others, if you want to use them, the instructions for the first template will be exactly the same.

New Blogger 3 column Sweet Dreams template
An example of a blog using this template is Medical Matters. You can download it from Download "Sweet Dreams" 3 column template (zip file). Save the zip file into a suitable folder, perhaps called "BloggerBuster Sweet Dream template" or something. After you downloaded and unzipped the file, you will get 3 column Sweet Dream xml template (highlighted with a red rectangle), a HTML file which when clicked on opens a webpage giving some instructions, an image folder, a music folder, a widger_code folder, and an xml template folder.



Refer to Backup and change New Blogger template. If you have already done some customizations (add Page Elements, etc.) edit the Page Elements one by one, paste them into Notepad files and save them into the same folder as some of the Page Elements will be deleted or become empty after you change to the new template. Click the TEMPLATE tab, then the EDIT HTML sub-tab to open the template editor. Click "Browser" and browser to the xml template highlighted with a red rectangle in the screenshot above. Click "Upload". You may get a message that some Page Elements (widgets) will get deleted. Go ahead and upload.

Update 11.10pm 15 August 2007: I found I missed some image URL's below when I recorded the original image URL's found in the original templatge, so created a test blog and tried uploading the template again and got a zip file. When I click on the zip file, I got the folders plus



When in Window Explorer, I click on the zip file, then a "Sweet_Dream" folder, I can get to the folders plus HTML and xml files as shown in the first screenshot above. However, when I click "Browse" to upload the template and and click on the zip file to get to the folders plus HTML and xml files, the zip file got loaded into the "browse" window instead. So I was forced to open Windows Explorer, went to the folder containing the folders and HTML and xml files shown in the screenshot above and drag them into the folder above. If you faced this problem, this is what you may need to do. I don't know why I didn't have this problem the first time I did it.

After you have uploaded, the new template will be in the template editor window. Look for line of codes that contain something like url(http://........gif). To illustrate, I will put in the relevant sections I found into the scroll box below:

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