for Valentine's Day, my move to this new template is just about complete. I still have some minor tweaking to do and a couple of items to put in place, but the biggest portion of it is finished. It really does feel like a breath of fresh air.

I did enjoy the old template, but the black was depressing after awhile. I've done some major housecleaning along the way as well, by removing much of the old sidebar content, because it was superfluous and really didn't belong in a blog. When I first began tinkering with Blogger templates, my blog was a major resource that I used as a springboard to all sorts of sites and content on the internet. Now, however, I use a set of personal pages for the vast majority of the former sidebar content. The end result, I believe, is a fresher, faster loading and cleaner blog.

I am glad I've learned to edit the template on Blogger, because it has helped me tremendously when I've been putting together my personal webpages. But the rest of the world (or the five readers of this blog) could probably not care less about which software I use or some of the links I use daily. Well, onward to better things. I am looking forward to spending more time here, and I will probably change the templates for my other blogs when time permits. You may now safely remove your hard hats...just don't peek too closely into the closets yet.