Over the holidays I did a bit of blog tweaking and thought I would share what I found.
1) CSS. This is an area I knew about but have not had time to study. I have started taking baby steps in customizing my blogger templates and I recommend HTML Dog as a good start.
2) *Templates. There are many free ones available but once you get the hang of the (simple) ones, you don't have to buy them as it is as simple as copying CSS code, although it is considered polite to acknowledge this and provide a link/reference to the creator/inventor.
3) *Inspector "Gadget". These "add-ons" for blogger have changed significantly over the past 2-3 years. No longer do you have to know python/php, C# or Java or even HTML (but it helps) as many of the tools are now wrapped as standardized API's. Blog Doctor is a cheesy example of one of these sites which is really just an amateur trying to make a few bucks, but it does have some good examples.
*This will save alot of grief later. Blogger has a some "backup" features - which is good in case something goes wrong (as I found out last year). But there are a few thing details "gloss'd over" that everyone should known about: 1) You must "export" the posts + comments and save as an xml data file. This will keep all of your and commenter "content" as well as encoded links and linked images (those you upload and store in Picasa may not be safe.) 2) Saving your "template" provides a copy of the basic CSS styles, including "some, but not all" gadgets and their content. For example my profile was intact because it was linked to my Google identity, but all links to blogs/websites I entered in the "links gadget" were lost! Other HTML/Javascript codes were obliterated as well. I suggest saving any unique HTML code a text file as backup.
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