I’ve been eyeing some really cute templates from The Cutest Blog on the Block, which many blogs I frequent have been using, but I have hesitated to try any of them for fear it would mess up my customized template. I’ve tried finding some backgrounds that would work well with my customized template, but it’s REALLY hard to find free backgrounds that have the lime green, hot pink, and bright blue that are all parts of my basic template. I finally decided to give this background a try. The only color it’s lacking is the blue so at least it’s pretty close. It still bugs me that it looks like the customized template is just sitting on top of the background instead of merged with the background, but at least this is better than the plain white that has been the background for the last week or so. How do you like it?

Amy from Split Decisionz has been working on a few blog changes for me. Some of the changes are more noticeable than others like the added butterfly with a dotted line. Isn’t that CUTE! A few of my more observant blogging friends noticed that change right away.

Other changes are not so obvious like moving my header image and other things (not sure what all) to a site where I won’t lose them in the future. The lady who originally created my template is no longer designing blogs and I was getting worried that my header/template might just disappear one day so I hired Amy to take care of that worry.

While at it, she also switched the template from the old blogger style to the new blogger style. The main thing you’ll notice with that change is that you can now use the function which was absent before. You’ll now notice that at the bottom of my page you can click and keep going backwards through older posts. Likewise, if you click on a label in my sidebar instead of just seeing the first ten entries you can now click and keep going back through all of the previous entries in that label category. I still haven’t figured out how to have the actual post show up instead of just the title linking to the post, but perhaps I’ll even figure that out one day. The main reason for this change was to allow access to all of the recipes, vacation posts, etc., whereas before only the ten most recent entires were viewable.

The other thing that is most helpful to me in switching from the old blogger format to the new blogger format is that I can now utilize the blogger gadgets to add things to my blog instead of having to do *everything* through HTML code in the actual template which is how I had to do it in the older blogger format. YEA! That’ll make my life much easier although I was actually enjoying all that I was learning about using HTML. Being able to add things via the gadget function is what made changing to this background fast and easy.

I like this background, but I’m still hoping Amy can create something for a background that will be more specific to my blog utilizing all of the colors of my header and maybe incorporating a butterfly or two here and there! This background from The Cutest Blog on the Block is called Doodles and you’ll find it under the Flourishes category of the background section if you go to the website to view it, you’ll see it has a really cute pink dotted stitching line all along the edge of the template. That would be REALLY cute and would go well with the dotted line/butterfly that Amy added.

Well. I hope you enjoy the change even though I only added it temporarily while waiting to see if Amy can create something that would be a perfect match for my header. It was fun to look around both of the above sites to find instructions for fun things to add.

That’s all the time for blogging I have today. Amanda will be here any minute to start our day-before-Thanksgiving cooking marathon!