#cam23, Extra Thing1: beautification

Having completed all of last year's 23 Things Cambridge programme, this year I'm just going to do each week's 'extra' Thing except for the odd Things that is new to the programme (and to me) this year. There might also be some overlap with Things from the 23 Things for Professional Development programme, too.

A favourite colour combination

The first Extra Thing is making your blog beautiful. As I commented (probably more than once) last summer, I am an inveterate tinkerer with things, and the very first things I did when I set up this blog was to start tinkering with the CSS of the template to try and get it to look how I wanted. To be honest, I never really succeeded, so spurred on by #cam23, I've changed to a Blogger template customized with some purple and yellow.

Gadgets-wise, I've had quite a few for quite a while, but I've swapped things about a bit to include a subscribe by email option and an RSS feed of recent #cpd23 posts. My favourite Blogger gadget is the 'html/java' box, because it let's you do almost anything you want to - the 'Recently registered' box over on the #cpd23 blog is created using that Gadget with some code from Delicious (to create a 'linkroll') pasted in.

Another good way to customize your blog is to make use of the 'pages' option to add a fixed pages. I've got two: one for the basics, and one to show some some things I've proud of having done.