I have been struggling for so many hours with the google blogger template system!!! So far, this has been quite a frustrative experience. So I thought I shared the source code of my template so people can benefit the hacks I have found:

• Hide the blogger header
• Use Shaded border with javascript
• Use the javascript syntax hightlighter, this one took me 3 hours!

On the whole, the xml based template language used by google is a good anti-pattern of a very complex and unreadable view language. The only way to work with this "cr*p" is Trial and errors ... Very frustrating!

Fortunately, there are still independant individuals who innovate in the open source world, check out the genius idead of Yuri Rashkovskii , a 25 years old nice ukranian geek (I have met him in Oslo). I will blog about lilu as soon as I have the chance to play with it.

I wanted to include the code of my template so you could copy-paste it but once again Blogger f*cked up everything (sic) and did not display it properly ...So please download it here !!!

In October 2006, I decided to use a google product - Blogger Beta - to manage my blog. So far, I am not sure it a wise idea because so far coz I don't like much the templating system.

Like today, I have lost about 1 hour fighting with the horribilis XML language used by the blogger beta template system. So I thought I could share my "google beta hack" with the world. I was looking for a way of integrating an addthis.com button to the bottom of each post. After a quick googling, I found a post with a snippet explaining how to do it. Unfortunately, it did not work because of stupid XML rules (grrrr).

I could not put the code in the post because blogger doesn't deal very well with html source code, so you can download this snippet here (only 3 lines)

That will generate a addthis.com bar which will look like:

As far as I am concerned, XML in this case, adds more complexity but nothing else ! What's the point of languages if humans can't read them, there must be a way of making better abstactions to represent the template and layout of a blog!!!

By the way, I am typing this Post using Google Docs & Spreadsheets ;-) I sold my soul to Google! At some point, we'll have to find a soluton to free ourself from this corporation ...