Blogger, so far ...

So far I have been very impressed with the Blogger software. I never used it pre-beta/pre-new version, but I have to say it has a very nice interface that pretty much anyone (who would be interested in a blog) should be able to figure out. They have made the important 80% easy to use and the other 20% decent. Not too shabby.

As I have been posting for a few days and customizing it off and on ... I have run into a couple little snags.

1. it took me several days to find a easy/clean way to add recent comments to the side bar without totally hacking my template (still not perfect, but given how easy the last tutorial I found was, worth it)
2. They have a fair number of good templates to choose from and the colors are for the most part customizable, but the one I am currently using (Rounders 2?) doesn't have a "stretch" version. The skinny post column is starting to get annoying, especially since pretty much no one I know who would read my blog uses 800x600 (and my stats agree with that)
3. Comments are shown on the "blogger" page along with the form to add one, which looks nothing like my blog and the link back to my blog isn't obvious. The comments can be seen along with the original article but only if you click on the article's title to see it by itself.
4. No non-hack-ish way to add sticky posts

That's about it. Anything more and I would be completely nit-picking. So yeah, its a great product and I recommend it.

** I may look into hacking my template to fix #2. If the blog looks like crud at any time over the next couple days, just attribute it to that and not my own personal style. Thank you.

[EDIT 11:17PM] After several hours of tooling around I have the site looking decent again and with a static (but geared toward 1024x768) layout. I tried a few templates I found online but none looked as good as their thumbnail. Most of the time was spent trying to figure out how the template worked (single file of xhtml but a little confusing), figuring out which CSS needed to be changed to make it bigger but keep the right look, and redoing most of all of the images the old template uses for the rounded corners (it was using 2 images per box, top/bottom ... I had to create 3 new ones (for 3 corners individually). The reason the boxes now don't have rounded right-top corners was because I gave up trying to get them to line up correctly and I think it looks almost better with the one sharp corner. Anyway, I am done for now. I like how it turned out. Only thing I wish was that the side bar was a little bigger and closer to the main area... but that would mean reworking the html for the two side areas and redoing 6 more images which I don't care enough to do. Maybe next week. Night all.