I'm not ready to use the blogger template designer yet

Just this afternoon, I received an email from the Blogger Team. The message landed on my inbox telling me that the new Blogger Template Designer is out. I asked myself what is this blogger template designer?
We all know that the blogger blog offers some cute blogger template, but those templates were not very attractive for some many bloggers and we all end up with cool blogger templates available on the internet. Thanks to many web designers who continuously create free but elegant blogger templates.
Now, this new blogger template designer is really cool. Very easy to use and you can even have your own customize design without knowing html and css.
But I'm not ready to take advantage of this new blogger template designer for now. Why? Because I want to focus on it by the time I'm doing it. And I can't focus on designing for now because I'm spending my weekend with my family. Yes it's weekend right now, and I want to spend it with my wife, my dog, my family and friends.
Maybe on weekdays while I'm at work and have nothing to do waiting for my students to finish their hands-on activity in ADOBE Photoshop.
But you can now have your very own blogger template design without knowing css.  Instructions here: http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2010/03/blogger-template-designer.html

Blogger.com Blogspot Custom Favicon.ico Google Hosting

As a Blogger.com or Blogspot blogger, we cannot host our own customized favicon.ico icon on our blog. Yes we can host images on on our PicasaWeb account and post it on our Blogger.com blog but we are not allowed to host any other files like documents and ".ico" icon.
But if you really want to change your favicon to stand out from the rest of Blogger.com or Blogspot blogger, there are simple ways to do it. I have a recent post on how I did it but I changed my mind on where should I host my custom favicon.ico.
On my previous post, I decided to upload my custom favicon.ico file on merrypic.com. It's a free image hosting site that also allows you to upload and host a ".ico" file. But recently I noticed that my custom favicon is missing for some time, and it's because of slight problem on my free merrypic hosting. So I decided to host my custom favicon.ico file on my Google account.
Yes, the powerful Mr. Google can host our favicon.ico so we can use it on our sites. If you type the url of your uploaded favicon.ico file, Google will let you download that file into your computer. Although it doesn't allow us to view the favicon.ico on our browser if we type the direct url of our custom favicon, but still, the file is there to serve us. All you have to do is put the url of your uploaded favicon.ico inside your head tag of your Blogger.com blog template and tada! your favicon is there.
So how does Mr. Google host your favicon.ico? Just upload it with your Google Site. Once you have your Google Site up and running, all you have to do is upload the favicon.ico on your Google Site as an attachment and Google will host it. Then you have to point the link on your Blogger.com template's head to your favicon.ico. Simple, Google. :)

Custom Blogger Favicon

Having a blog in blogger.com or the so called "blogspot" blog is very handy. Any one can blog using blogger because of its simplicity. 


And it is so simple because you don't have to think most of anything like hosting, design, domain and etc. So I decided to have my blog with Blogger.com as part of my "back to basic" mindset.

With Blogger.com, your blog will have a default favicon of white "B" in an orange rounded rectangle. I'm not happy with that and I want to change it. Just to change hehe. It's not that hard though.


 It's like having a custom favicon for your self-hosted site. The only difference is, unlike if you have your own hosting account, you cannot host your .ico file inside your Blogger account. So you have to host it somewhere. Once your .ico file is uploaded on the internet, just do the coding on your Blogger.com blog's head section and point to your .ico address.

Here's some tip for you to try:

1. Create an image that you want to be your favicon using Adobe Photoshop. Save it as .jpg, .png or .gif. 
2. Make it an .ico file with Dynamic Drive Favicon Generator and download the generated favicon to your computer.
3. Upload it to merrypic.com and get the direct link of it.
4. Go to your Blogger.com blog's "Edit HTML" inside the "Layout" settings and use your uploaded favicon url to link it to your blog. See instructions on how to edit your template code here.
5. Save your template and your new custom favicon is set.

If you don't see your new favicon on your browser, just refresh, ctrl+f5, restart, or clear your browser's cache. Or use another newer browser. :)