The new blogger

I got the invite to upgrade my blog to the new Blogger today. I'm not making use of any of the new features yet (eg. tags, comment feed, different archiving links). That's b/c it doesn't let you edit the raw html once you convert to a new template and I have a lot of custom code in my template. Plus, I want to do a complete overhaul of the design of this blog when I do the conversion.

The best thing about the new blogger is that the pages are dynamically created. It's all backend stuff. You don't see the effect, but for me, when I'm changing the settings, I no longer have to "republish" my blog, which takes a while since my blog is pretty big.

Anyways, while I was looking through things, I made some cosmetic changes to my blog. It's all in the sidebar. The most noticeable difference is that I now show a picture on the side. The cool thing is the picture randomly changes everytime you load the page! It's similar to what Nusraat does, but I had to do it slightly different b/c I'm using Blogger and not hosting it myself. I just used a bit of Javascript to write the image tag into the document where the image url is randomly chosen.

Code snippet:

    <script language="JavaScript">
      <!--
      var numImages = 5;
      var imgIdx = Math.floor(Math.random() * numImages);
      document.write("<img src='http://www.blah.com/ImageName" + imgIdx + ".jpg'>");
      //-->
    </script>
    <noscript>
      <img src="http://www.blah.com/ImageName.jpg" />
    </noscript>