My Blog skin...and thoughts on Blog personalization

I began tinkering with my CSS again recently and instantly got frustrated with the skins offered on this blog host.  The lack of support for more reasonable skins in the ASP.NET Weblogs site is pretty bad, and I'm getting a bit jealous at the extensive skin support on other .TEXT sites such as dotnetjunkies and sqljunkies.  I always liked the cache' and feeling of being on the .NET blogs equivilent of Boardwalk/Park Place with my blog being hosted by an official Microsoft site (www.ASP.net) but that is starting to wear thin these days. 

Personalization is a big part of the self-expression I see as the core value of Blogs.  Without the ability to easily change the appearance of your blog, you can quickly end up with a very homogenized version of your blog rather than one that reflects your personality.  This is great for Microsoft employees who want to have a common "branding" of their blogs - much like wearing the same style blue shirts at PDC - but for the hundreds of independent bloggers on weblogs.asp.net  its hard to stand-out from the masses.

These days, I don't have much time to spend bugging Scott to do something about it, so its almost easier to just move my blog.  I could quickly setup my own .TEXT site using a friend's servers for hosting, or try one of the many other blog-sites available today.

Maybe I'm just being anal about this whole personalization thingy.  It should be good enough that I have free blog hosting on a high-traffic site....It should be good enough that I can change any and all text on my blog....It should be good enough....hmmm.   Well, maybe its just that I don't like "good enough"...that I'm tired of seeing so much "good enough" at my day job that I want a bit of "awesome", "excellent", or "neato" on my blog!

Sorry, its late, I'm tired and rambling....later...

3 Comments

  • I guess I should be more specific.



    My main complaint is that the skins on this site are not adequately "tagged" with Class and ID attributes to enable better CSS style application. Also, it would be nice if the Classes and ID attributes that do exist were consistently named/purposed across each of the base skins so that you could apply the same CSS across multiple skins. This would be like a base ICSS interface implemented on each Skin in order to make skins truly polymorphic in relation to the custom CSS.



    (more rambling) *sigh*



    More skin choices would help, but more consistency in existing skins owuld be just as good.



    Of course, unfortunately since Telligent owns the competing "Community Server" AND maintains the ASP.NET website, it seems unlikely for Rob and the crew to spend much time on the blogs here.....

  • You say it would be nice to be like sqljunkies, well when we moved to community server the skins available reduced. So I've resorted to lots of hacks. Like posting floating divs in the news section and posting other divs in links this allows me to move some of my left bar to the right.



    If you look at my blog it is actually implemented with a 2 column skin, and using the hacks I mention. If you look at the source you will be able to figure what I have done.



    Simon

  • Ah. I guess I was recalling your previous .TEXT implementation with the extra skins.



    I didnt realize that CS was even worse in this area. :(



    Maybe I should restart development on the old blog engine I created right before .TEXT caught my attention.....hmmm

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