I decided to test out the blog template creator using the great program called Artisteer. It took some trial and error, but I got it to work. First, I tried to re-create the PastisEnterprises.com look, keeping the same color scheme and header features. That wasn’t too difficult. Then I saw that Artisteer supported flash now. (Honestly, I don’t care for lots of bells and whistles, but since I was playing around I used it.)
Next, I tried to publish straight to blogger, using Picassa to hold the art work. This is the default in the Artisteer program. It does give the option to export the files to ftp or ImageShack. Since I just wanted to test it out, I went with the default option. Unfortunately, it failed. It didn’t like the flash header, so I dropped it and tried again.
The software said it had been published. So I clicked on the view page and the template was there. All the posts were gone, though. So, I bit the bullet and took a look at the code. All appeared to be alright. Sure, Artisteer puts a lot of extra stuff and left out some of the new blogger features, but I can live with that.
So, back to Artisteer. I took out the menus, and other extra’s and this time saved the file to my computer instead of publishing directly to my blog.
Then, back on blogger, I went to my dashboard. Then to the Design tab, then selected Upload file. Found the blogger.xml file that Artisteer had exported to my computer, and followed those commands.
It worked.
That piqued my curiosity. Maybe it was just my layout and Artisteer could publish it directly? So, again, with the trimmed version of the layout, I attempted to publish directly to blogger. Once again, it said it was successful, and once again, there were no posts in the blog. So, I reverted to the old layout out.
To make a long story short, if you’re going to use Artisteer to create Blog templates, export the file instead of trying to publish it automatically. It shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes and you’ll have a functional and, completely personalized, template for your blog.
I think you’ll be able to add additional widgets after you get your Artisteer-created template up and running. To do that, you go through your blogger account dashboard and click design, edit pages and then add widgets.
Note: I am using Artisteer version 2.4.0 and there has been an update since then that may have fixed the problem of publishing directly to blogger. I just am short of funds at the moment, but that’s another story.