Saturday, December 1, 2012

Learning Blogger Templates - Starting from Nothing

Like many programmers, I like reading others posts and looking at sample code, but when I really want to grok something I like to dig into it myself.

I find the Blogger.com platform interesting and want to better understand their templating engine.

As a first step I want to build the minimal template that Blogger.com will accept and eventually add structure, content, style and behaviour so the site looks like I want it.

The minimal template requirements and markup information I will use Template of Doom, as well as Blogger.com's official help.


Blogger.com, allows you to get at the raw XML, which is mostly XHTML, CSS and Javascript, along with some Blogger.com template tags, through a web based text editor.

Blogger.com's editor validates your code before allowing you to save. If there is a syntax error, it won't save. If you have widgets of a certain type and don't include certain corresponding code, the editor will add the boilerplate code for that widget type.

The minimal possible template is:






 
    </p> <p>     <b:skin><![CDATA[]]></b:skin></p> <p>   </head></p> <p>   <body></p> <p>     <b:section id='id1'/></p> <p>     <b:section id='id2'/></p> <p>   </body></p> <p> </html></p> <p> </p> <p> <br></p> </div> <p> <!--data-blogger-escaped-<html xmlns:b="http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b" xmlns:data="http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data" xmlns:expr="http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><br /><br /><br /><head><br /><br /><br /> <title><br> <b:skin/> <br><br><br></head><br><br><br><body><br><br><br> <b:section id='id1' /><br> <b:section id='id2'/><br><br><br></body><br><br><br></html>
-->