Now you see it, now you don't!

That's how the template of this blog (hosted on Blog*Spot and obviously powered by Blogger) has been behaving in the past few days.

It all started when Blogger took that momentous step towards moving all its users over to Dano. I was surprised to see the Dano interface on my non-Dano blog and took me a few moments to realize that Blogger had started the migration.

All seemed good. I tried to post an entry on Friday morning. Thats when I realized something was amiss because I just could not publish my blog. So, I tried to find the error details and saw that my template had disappeared completely. The template box was empty... nice and clean!

There have been times in the past when the template has looked funny. But that has been when the folks at Blogger were probably doing some routine maintenance work. But this time the template had disappeared completely. Even so, I waited half a day for it to re-appear as magically as it had vanished! But being a Muggle, magic was obviously out of the question!

So I went to Control and lodged a complaint quoting the error I was getting while publishing the blog and explaining that my template had vanished into thin air of the cyberspace. But it has been more than 72 hours since I entered my complaint and the status of the complaint still shows "Unreviewed" which is just a euphemism for "nobody has given a shit's worth of attention to the complaint".

So today, I built up my blog's template from an old backup that I had kept. (foresightedness at its shining best!). But only a few minutes after that, my template disappeared again! If this is what the new Dano experience is all about... spare me folks! I'll move over to Movable Type (which I'm going to do in about a month's time, anyways!).

I advise all you Blogger users to take backups of your templates immediately and keep taking backups when you make any changes to the template. I believe even Anita had a scary experience, a couple of weeks back, when her template vanished. So... chant the backup mantra to be safe!

So it was template rebuilding time for me today. And while I was at it, I made a few changes to the template...

I added a dotted line between posts to act as a divider since it was often confusing to differentiate between posts on my blog.

I changed the "New Post" indicator which indicates that a blog has nad a new entry posted to it (duh!). The new indicator is tinier and not-so-distracting as the last one I was using.

And the most important update I made was the addition of the Sideblog. You can see it just below on the zonkboard on the right hand column. Sideblog is a tiny blog just like the one they have on... ummm... Metafilter for example. I'll be using the Sideblog to make announcements and/or to post some special links or... errr.... well, ok! I haven't thought of a use for it yet. But it's a nice tool and I'll put it to good use! :-)

Well, that's about it for the moment!