Whew!

New template is up and running. Please let me know if it looks odd in your browser. I've tested it with Firefox and IE, but nothing else.

For those of you thinking about switching your template to Blogger Beta, I really really recommend you do it when you have at least five or six hours free to play around with it. For one thing, when they say: "you will lose many of the changes you previously made to your template" they mean, "you will lose everything you EVER did to your template and have to start again from scratch".

I did, of course, keep a copy of the old template in a file, and even if I hadn't, they do let you revert back once you see the horrible mess the new template makes of your beautiful blog (sob), but it is a serious pain in the arse to copy across all your customisations, especially if you have to adapt them to the new template code.

Also if, like me, you decide to create a new blog to build your new template on and then transfer it across once it is working nicely, you should be aware that while the general layout of the blog is all in the html file, and the number and position of elements on the blog will stay the same (sidebar boxes, etc), the content of those boxes seems not to be contained in the html template. So after you copy across the template, you then have to put any javascript stuff back in manually.

Anyway, it is all there now, and it seems to work okay, and the only thing I couldn't manage to keep from the old template was the little randomiser thingy that maked my commentators sound like Biggles on drugs. And that isn't all that great a loss, I suppose. (Sob.)

Two more things: Categories will gradually return as I get around to sticking labels on old posts. And now that my blogroll is all big and juicy, please let me know if you feel left out: I am happy to add any of my regular readers.