Blogging on Blogger

We’ve already complained about WordPress’s fugly free Themes (here and here) and now it’s Blogger’s turn. We’ll be splitting our observations in 2 posts. This first one is more about how we settled on our current 2 blog Themes, and the next one will be about an experiment we made with a test blog and all 12 Blogger Themes.

As we said on our first post on blogging, we created our first blog here, The Snarky Cats of Ulthar, in the aftermath of the failure with our self-hosted WordPress blog. Needless to say, we weren’t in the mood to complicate things, we just wanted a place where to put the already existing posts and maybe add some more in a lame attempt to get people interested in our digital comic book series. As we’ve written previously, Blogger is a lot easier than WordPress – all you do is pick a Theme and start writing (or, as we’ve recently found out, just start writing because you’re automatically assigned a default Theme). Sure, there are maybe a couple of things you have to do, like adding pages to the Navigation Menu in the Layout tab, but everything is as simple as possible. We picked the first one, Contempo Dark, and didn’t even realize we could change the Header image for a very long time. At one point, we figured it out and replaced it with our own. We also didn’t know we could change the background of the posts, and switched to Contempo Pink because the white background/black text combo was easier to read. Later, we switched to the Soho Pink and stayed with it for a while. We went back to Contempo because we wanted the post excerpts on the main page, and when we moved our first spin-off blog, A Goat 4 Zazzie, back to Blogger, we thought that maybe it was time for a radical change. So, we switched both blogs to the Notable, more specifically, the Pink and the Dracula. Fortunately, by then we had finally found the Customize option in the Theme section (it’s not hidden, we’re just that slow), and we were able to get rid of that orange tone.

The new Themes looked very clean and tidy, especially the Pink, which is super white. This is less visible on smaller screens, but since we were doing all this customizing on a desktop, it looked just too light. We’ve already mentioned that Blogger offers a ton of customization, but sometimes not everything sticks, and it seems the Theme’s basic specifications, like whether it’s a dark or light one, can override some changes. We could be wrong, of course, but that’s the only explanation we could think of. All the Notable posts begin with a drop cap, which created a bit of a problem. Since we never bothered adding more than one author, all posts come out as by The Snarky Cats of Ulthar and we just write the author’s name at the top of the post. Naturally, with a drop cap, that just looked weird, so we had to move it to the bottom of the post. Somehow we managed to do it to all the posts… and then we decided that the clean, tidy Notable really didn’t match our style and returned to the Contempo. We kept putting the author’s name on the bottom of the post because we want the posts to match and there’s no way we’re going back and change all the others. You can see the homepages + sidebars of the main blog (Contempo Dark) and the spin-off (Contempo Pink) below. The one for the main blog has since been updated due to the creation of this blog, but the overall look is pretty much the same. By the way, the reason the Header turns up in the background more than once is because when we scrolled down to get a screenshot of the full sidebar, the rest of the homepage stayed still.

We’ve decided not to switch again and instead focused on the sidebar. For the first time, we’re using Gadgets (Blogger’s version of Widgets), and we feel even dumber than usual for not having done it before. They do have some limitations, though. For instance, the Image Gadget allows for a caption, but when we tried to use it, the text was too dark and there was no way to change that. You can change the Gadget Title colour, so the image ‘caption’ you see on the main blog’s sidebar is really the Gadget Title. We also had to ditch the Feed Gadget for the more recent posts because for some reason it picked up a much older post and one that had already been deleted. We’re using it for the Tag Highlight, and it works fine, though. The Categories, which is one advantage WordPress has over Blogger, was made with a Link List Gadget, and is a great way to better sort the posts for anyone who finds themselves on one of the blogs.

Before we settled on the Notable, we had tried out some of the other Themes. Since we were in a hurry, we decided it wasn’t the right time for that. However, we remained curious about those Themes and blamed any issues we had experienced on our ignorance. After the main blog and the spin-off were settled, we decided to experiment a little. We had 2 ideas for 2 very different blogs: The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: Cyber Edition, which would focus on our online experiences; and An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying, which would focus on our books. We wanted something completely different for The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: Cyber Edition – no floofy cats or comic book images. The only thing we added was a simple Header showing blue circuits with a black background that we made using Canva Graphics. By contrast, our other experimental blog, An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying, had images in practically every post, and would naturally require a more fun look. Two very different blogs and a whole bunch of yet unused Themes. After all, Blogger offers 12 Themes and we had only really used 3. The Essential Light, which is the most basic of all and pretty much looks like an online notebook, was quickly discarded. That left 8 Themes. We started hopeful, but ended up incredibly frustrated. How the hell could those perfectly good looking Themes turn out so incredibly fugly? How? Like before, our first reaction was to blame ourselves, but as we looked in vain for a way to stop the full posts from turning up in the Awesome Inc homepage (which version? ALL OF THEM), we realized that despite our experience with fugly blog Themes (sorry, not sorry, WordPress), Blogger had managed to fool us. These other Themes might’ve looked good on the Themes page, but when applied to a real blog with actual posts in it, they ended up looking cluttered, visually unappealing, and confusing. Oh, and most of them don’t automatically adapt to smaller screens and force visitors to pick a Simplified View to read posts without having to zoom in. How the hell can this be possible in 2024? We’re guessing there are some people who use these Themes, as Blogger wouldn’t keep them around otherwise, but God, they look terrible. As for the 2 blogs, Cyber Edition existed briefly as one of the WordPress.com spin-offs, and as you can see, we've now combined both of them as The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: WIP.

When we first thought of writing this post, we were going to include photos of our main blog with each of those Themes just to show how bad they looked. We weren’t really going to change the current Theme, just preview the others. However, we felt that maybe the previews might not be entirely accurate, and since we’re on Blogger and have no intention of leaving, we felt it might be fairer to actually apply the Themes to a blog and see how far a couple of cyber ignoramus like ourselves could go with the customization options. Naturally, we weren’t going to mess up our real blogs for a post that will likely not be read by more than a half dozen people, and so we created a test blog – The Bog Witch. We’ll reveal the many faces of The Bog Witch in our next post, but you can already see the Contempo version (the Contempo Light is the default version for newly created blogs) below.