Over on Blogger Buster, I've just released my first premium eBook and Blogger Templates collection, Building Websites with Blogger.

Written over the course of several months, this is a complete guide to building a website design using Blogger's simple interface. Covering CSS and HTML code in conjunction with Blogger specific code, it was written in plain language making it easy for those without any prior experience of web coding to design themselves a beautiful Blogger-based website.

Go take a look!

For a little while now I've been using the Irrestistable theme by Woothemes (converted for Blogger by Wordpress to Blogger) as the template for this site.

It's a beautiful design. For a while, it was almost exactly what I wanted. And for those who've been wondering, I must admit that this is the first and only theme I've ever paid for: while I'm capable of recreating the conversion myself, I was impatient and intrigued by just how well coded this theme is! Kudos to tmwwtw for pulling it off =)

But...

I am a blog designer. A professional. Dissatisfied and aching to experiment.

In recent days, I've discovered a couple of truly awesome blogs. Namely JasonSantaMaria.com and  Desandro.com. On these sites, each and every single blog post is individually styled, from the blog title right through to the content, image placement. Even the comments section.

I'm musing that this is the missing link between web and print design, and a factor I am hugely inspired by.

What's more, I'm excited by new trends of minimalist web design: grid-based layouts, a focus on typography; unconventional positioning and factoring in The Golden Ratio for a pleasing, almost philosophically based design.

This blog is my personal site. My sandbox, if you like, where I can and should post however I choose without the limitations and conventions associated with my other niche-focused sites. I'm also, at heart, a designer. And I like to think of myself as a pioneer when it comes to designing with Blogger!

Stay tuned. A new design is on it's way. Along with a new focus...

I've just posted the widget installer on Blogger Buster for people to use the "Top Commenters" widget in their blogs.

Phew, I have to say it's something of a relief to finally have this up and running! I was experimenting and coding for eight hours straight last night until I'd got the installation down to a tee. Then as I (finally) went to bed, I remembered some other tweaks I could make, and other things which I really ought to include.

Back to the drawing board again this morning! I finally completed this about 1 minute after I'd originally meant to post! But I'm so glad that I did this: now I have the knowledge and tools available to me so I can create customizable widget installers for so many other Blogger widgets too.

Like a Flickr photostream for instance...

Generally speaking, I'm not too bad at JavaScripting, but I'd never truly mastered inserting variables from a form into another JavaScript element. Had to learn all about that, plus how to parse XML to properly display as items in an ordered list!

Eventually I may post a full write up of the process (wonder how many A4 pages that would take up..?).

For now, if you want to show a list of your blog's top commentators, go install the widget now and see for yourself how this works :)