Blog templates? Yes, but whats needed is a change of mindset in looking at the templates as “blog” templates. If one learns the tags, even the minimum to make them work there is no design limit.

One can tage any site on the planet and replace the content with the “blog” tags and make them editable. Just use whatever tags you want where you want.

Of course I am speaking about what is basically the only three that are easily editable, WP, MT, and EE, and in that order. the rest of the nuke lookalikes not worth the time to bother trying.
Graeat article, thanks

Love the WordPress look here, BTW. Much easier on the eyes than your old look.

-Cf

Well, maybe the Soylent Green reference is a bit of hyperbole, but at the very least blogs are made by people and that is what matters.
Believe it or not, there is still a lot of discussion within and throughout the blogosphere about what actually cons…

I think it addresses this need nicely, but I am starting to think of some ways that it can be improved. The search engines are still finding me just fine too. I even think it has improved my bounce rate.

So I did a extremely rough layout of what that might look like, using the categories from my blog. It’s all info from the same blog, but each box is limited to a single category and it only shows one entry from that category. This presents a problem with entries tagged with multiple categories though, like in that second row. The same entry appears twice, because seperate boxes are tagged to display only “music” or only “media”. But that entry was tagged Music AND Media, so it appears twice. Also, the different lengths of the entries pushes the design (laid out via tables) outta whack. The full url format also throws off the width of columsn and thus the design. Pictures would pose another problem, and where the text goes around the picture. Even if the design was more professional looking, it would still be limited by this exact format. Someone would need to relayout this “page” on some annual basis, be it daily, weekly or whatever and that’s currently quite a task in web design.

A lot of the common tools for doing page layout aren’t available on the web, stuff like multiple colums (Yeah, I know CSS 3 is supposed to handle that, but it’s still a couple of years off), being able to easily layout a age in an EXACT way or baring that a way for boxes/colums/rows etc to flex to the display device in a format that’s reads across all browswers.

So, yeah, the single page list format is getting old, but IT’S EASY for now and someone upthread mentioned, it’s easier for people to adjust formatting quirks than it is for software to adjust us at the moment.

Or perhaps not. Check out the mixed columns and rows category at cssdrive.com

Double that importance if a blogger gets ad revenue from his site (yes, I know you demeaned that too - your loss) and ad placement is important. Triple that if the blogger tries to tie his older content together (as I do).

I’m actually looking for a designer to do a new template for me from a professional sense because, though my template does just fine in terms of aesthetics, it needs to have a new layout to tie my stuff together better.

I’m gladd you like RSS and that’s all you want. Not everyone is like you. And since you’re coming from the consumer perspective I can understand your shortness of sight. FRom the producer perspective, I want something for more than just Scott to enjoy.

Even further than that, I think that a blogger should shy from spending his/her time on playing with blog templates. A better alternative is to write in sites like Linkadelic Magazine where the blog is already built and the readers are already there. So it’s the content that differs the good stuff from the bad stuff.

In my experience with MT, the tool is getting incrementally better in this regard with each release. I think it’s already a great tool for creating some truly useful web sites, blogs or otherwise. It may take some skill with coding to pull off, but why shouldn’t it?

So much so, in fact, that I wrote my own content management system for my site, justkidding.com. It allows me to have many blog-like streams of info that I think of as channels. I wrote it so that each of them has a template available so that I can fit my commentary into an appearance appropriate for that kind of info (short comment following a link for bookmarks, a long-form essay format, etc). I also made it so that it works with bookmarklets for easy linking. My front page has six channels on it but I have another five or six that I use for my own purposes.

It makes me mighty happy. There are many nice things about being a programmer but I have to tell you, this is one of the best parts.

A lot of people have responded to this topic with things like “Anything can be done, you just have to do a little coding.” This obviously defeats the purpose.

There are two possibilities in that case—either establish a competitive product which offers more services out of the box (this will in turn increase the necessity of other blog packages to either become more robust, more usable/flexible, cheaper in terms of pay services, etc), or create the templates and extend the tools yourself, offering the results to the public domain. There are plugin architectures and repositories for exactly this purpose; if you yourself are not a coder, and there is nothing available that fulfills your needs, then there is always the possibility of paying an experienced and capable developer to program these tools and/or templates for you. There’s no shame in going to a professional and actually paying for stuff you need, especially if you see blogging as more than a simple hobby.

As an example that the data (post+entries+categories+authors) can be presented however you dream possible, here’s a “forum view” of my blog.

A lot of people are using Wordpress and MT in innovative ways. In fact, sometimes you wouldn’t even know that blog software is being used under the hood.

Bob, I understand your point that if you’re not a coder, it may not be easy to achieve all these goals (although plugins are making many things really simple). To include all these plugins in a default install would make the software more and more bloated (and most people don’t need these extra features). Have a look at the plugin sites and you’ll be surprised at how much flexibility there is these days.