I added a link to Dreambook, a free hosted guest book service. At the moment I'm stuck with the ad banners because I can't figure out how to link my Dreambook ID with my Dreamhost (my site hosting provider) ID to get the banner-free guestbook I want. Hopefully I'll get that figured out soon.

The formatting problem on the site log archive page did turn out to be browser-specific, but is only an indication that the template isn't giving the browser sufficient instructions. I'm thinking about two options: fuss around with the template until I get it fixed, or just scrap the whole template and build a new one. The fact that Blogger can DO that without touching the content continues to astonish and impress me.

Just took a quick look at NewsBlogger.com. Looks like something to check out once its out of beta. Allows you to post news stories to your site.

Ok, I've worked out almost all of the problem. Just one little thing remains.

The links at the bottom of the page, to go to the archive file, have to be updated manually. This is a pain. Also, the archive pages themselves use the exact same template as the main page, so if they're stored in a subdirectory, the links have to be absolute (e.g. href="www.tomleslie.ca/archive/archive.html") instead of relative (e.g. href="archive/archive.html") because otherwise they won't work for the archive pages. This is also a pain. The archive index page is the only page built from the archive template. This is not well explained, which is a pain.

I still love Blogger, mind you; the fact that it can do this stuff at all is amazing. The fact that it's free even more so.

The last, nagging problem is that the formatting on my site log archive index page is a bit weird, and I can't figure out why. Frankly, it looks like it's the browser's fault, because the HTML looks identical to that of the main page's archive index page, which formats fine. Still a pain.

Well, the first challenge came up right away. I forgot to define the archive rules for the site log page. Blogger seems to have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to archives; they work ok, but the templates have to be manually fixed to point to the correct files and paths. It's a bit annoying. Anyway, right now the template has been updated but for some reason it's not publishing properly. More when I figure out why.

A new blog to talk about the history of tomleslie.ca.

This is now my third personal web site. The other two suffered the common ignomony of being set up, updated once or twice, and otherwise left to rot. Blogger has certainly made keeping this site fresh much, much easier.

Of course it doesn't do everything I want it to. So my long-term plan is to develop a system for posting not just news, comments and updates, but also pictures, discussion links, music and new pages with the same easy procedures that Blogger supports. A tall order.

I'm going to start by trying to rebuild this site using CSS. This would be the second time I've taught myself CSS, but the first time that I'll (hopefully) have enough content to make it worth the experiment.

Blog on!