The Bleeding Ear 3.0

Today I roll out The Bleeding Ear version 3.0.

Welcome!

For the few of you who have stuck with me as life has gotten crazy (med school and birth of child) resulting in fewer posts, you will realize that, yes, ngục giới has frozen over. I have commented time and time again how I am working on my blog ... trying to fix my blog ... trying to update my blog, etc.

what you see is TBE with a totally new engine

It has been my excuse for not posting for who knows how long. Most of you probably assumed long ago that I was a pathological liar (I'm sorry Susan, so so so so sorry. Will you ever forgive me? I haven't forgotten you, and I WILL respond to your email).

Well, it's finally here. Much work over Christmas break has finally put the finishing touches on my excuse. Yes, it still looks overtly similar to version 2.0. However, I promise you that it's different. If you still think I'm a pathological liar, visit my test website, trietstest.blogspot.com, or take version 3.0 for a test drive.

My journey started many moons ago when Blogger decided to move to layouts. "Blogger Beta" as it was called, put my "Classic layout" at a decided disadvantage. Sure, I could keep going as before, writing my own code, editing my javascript, piecing together hack after hack to get functionality written into Blogger layouts, all without support from Blogger if something went wrong, OR, I could make the perilous journey of learning the new blogger and entering Nirvana.

Some of you might ask, "what's the big deal?" I thought this too at first. I tried to just convert my layout over, but I had so many add-ons to my template, that it never read them right. Blogger sometimes thought I had more than one widget with the same name, my CSS never translated correctly, and eventually I was forced to accept the reality that my piecemeal blog was too complicated for a recreational HTML coder like myself to just "recreate."

And so, I treaded water for many moons, nibbling here or there, but never doing great things until I found firebug. It was introduced to me by Ecmanaut. Firebug allows you to look at a webpage, view its source code, and see exactly what goes where. As you scroll over code, it highlights that thing on the page. You can edit the HTML, javascript, or CSS and see immediately what the webpage would look like with your changes.

This lifesaver allowed me to pull up TBE side-by-side with my test blog, and see exactly what wasn't translating correctly from Classic Blogger to New Blogger. What had taken months, was finished in the two weeks of Christmas break (outside of when i was playing Guitar Hero III ... but that's another story).

yes, ngục giới has frozen over

So what you see is TBE with a totally new engine. Everything is in layouts, giving me greater flexibility. Freshtags is still around because many of my old posts are in that format, although I imagine eventually it will be phased out. There's lots of stuff in my sidebar, so everything "[+/-]" is expandable if you click on it.

I expect there will be a few bugs here and there. I haven't tackled comments at all, so you'll probably be wisked away to that ubiquitous, ugly blogger comment page if you wish to leave one. Otherwise, I expect it to drive well. Give it a test spin, and tell me what you think!