I had been looking for a cleaner Blogger theme in the open-domain. A search on Google fetched me millions of results. I just tic-tac-toed and clicked on a few. A hell lot of templates were available. But they all had their own pro’s and con’s. For me the two things that were disappointing were:

First, the themes were made for Blogger 2.0 and hence, one would not be able to use the NEW templating features of Blogger 3.0. Second, all the templates were made for 800 x 600 resolution. Most of my visitors have a resolution of 1024 x 768 or more, rather 98% of them. So why should I be stuck up with a them that caters to only 2% of my visitors.

Anyways, I finally found two templates that had good looks and gave me a clean interface: one was from Beckett and the other one a port ofFoliage theme from Wordpress. The only way out is to port them myself to Blogger 3.0.

At first, it seemed to be a herculian task, but then, I had no other option. Looking deeper into the template, and reading a bit about the blogger XML namespace, I can say that Google has really developed the code in a very nice and intutive way. Just change the CSS and get the looks you want. No need to tweak the HTML code.

I have already started work on the latter one, and it is almost 70% complete, with only a few fixes left, and UI scripting that needs to be added. It is a little time consuming process, as I don;t have much knowledge on DIV and CSS hacks, but again Google always comes to the rescue. I will also be do the beckett one shortly.

So keep looking into the space for the URL of the themes, as I would release them in the open domain ;)