I decided it was time to create a couple new blogs last month. So I took the opportunity to try out the new automatic, drag-and-drop oriented layouts that were introduced a couple of years ago.
Let me say, they are quite a bit easier than the old template-based layouts that Blogger (Blogspot's back end) has had for half a decade!
I never minded writing CSS or HTML. I kind of enjoy it, actually. I knew CSS before I started. So the blog templates gave me a chance to test my skills on something pretty complex. Web application pages are actually easier to design, in a lot of ways, than a big blog.
However, the template you had to edit was very big and quite unwieldy after a lot of content got added into the sidebars. The built-in template editor was kind of crude. Compounding that, for some reason my Firefox browser would often select a bunch of text while I scrolled. I think it was due to a dropped mouse event or something. I kind of messed up my templates a couple of times a few years back due to that. Recovering from those situations was a bear.
No plans at this point to go back and re-design my existing blogs here from template-based to the drag-and-drop based layouts. I certainly plan to do any new blogs using these new drag-and-drop layouts, though!
