JTemplates

Serif (1 column)

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Sample blog
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Serif (2 column)

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Sample blog
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QED

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Sample blog
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Orange

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Sample blog
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Entropy (2 column)

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Sample blog
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Entropy (1 column)

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Sample blog
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Blocks

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Sample blog
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Also, see the Earth-tone variant, Blocks Earthy:

Sample blog
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BrownOrange

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Sample blog
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Tips for using the templates

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JTemplates are designed to be easy-to-use and work right out of the box.

Basic installation instructions
If you don't know anything about XHTML, CSS or blogs, you can still use the templates. To install, just follow these steps:

Right-click on the download link and save the template to your desktop
Open the saved file in a text editor (Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on the Mac will do)
Copy the entire template
Sign in to blogger and click on the Change Settings button next to your blog
Click on the Template tag and replace the existing template with the text that you copied
Click on Save Changes then click on Republish Entire Blog to change all of your existing posts to use the new template

Adding user information
Each template has the ability to let users add a little bit of information about themselves without having to edit any HTML. Instead of using Blogger's built-in profile code, JTemplates use the Description field located under Settings: Basic in the dashboard. Just add your information or any links that you want to describe your blog and click on Save settings to customize your blog.

Comments
JTemplates are designed for smaller, simpler blogs, so they don't have any code that allows for comments. You can use comments with JTemplates, but you have to modify the template code mannually. Blogger provides tips on how to do this.

Date format
Some of the JTemplates do not use Blogger's DateHeader tag to add dates to posts (this tag creates one entry for each day, even if there are multiple posts for that day). Instead, the BlogItemDateTime tag is used. However, the default setting for the data that this tag produces is to produce the time that the post was published. To have it display the date, click on the Settings tab in the dashboard, then click on Formatting and set the Timestamp Format settings to the desired option.

About images

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Some JTemplates use images for their headers. These images are hosted on a personal Flickr account which should not be used as a mass file host. If you wish to use a JTemplate that uses an image, please download the image at host it yourself.

If you are unfamiliar with this process, don't worry, it's quite simple. To download the image:

Visit the sample blog page and right click on the image
Select view background image*
Right click on the image that Step 2 produced and save it somewhere on your computer

* May be slightly different for browsers besides Firefox, but the option will always be present.

To host the file, sign up for a free Flickr account. Upload the image to your Flickr account and click on the uploaded image. Then select All sizes above the image. Copy the text in the Grab the image's static URL field.

Then edit the template (help here) in a text editor. Find the place at the top of the file that says

backround-image: url(http://...)

and replace everything inside the parentheses with the static URL copied from Flickr.

About

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Welcome to JTemplates. These are Blogger templates that I have accumulated over the years for various blogs.

Style
JTemplates are desigined for a different type of blog. Rather than the busy, unfocused blogs that you see all over the net, blogs using JTemplate templates are modren minimalist and content-focused. Certain bells and whistles have been deliberately ignored in order to promote more readable pages. Most of the templates are one- or -two column layouts with simple color schemes and easy navigation.

Standards
All of these templates were designed to be fully semantic and highly usable. The templates are either valid XHTML and CSS or close to it ;)

License
All of the templates posted are open-source. You are free to modify them or incorporate them into existing designs. You can also port them to other systems. If you make a new theme based on one of mine, or you port a template to a new blogging system, consider emailing me. I will make your work available on this blog.

Support
I do not offer support or customization for the templates, but if you have a question, comment, or suggestion, email me and I will take it into consideration.

Tools
These templates were designed on a G4 iBook running OS X 10.3 using TextWrangler and Firefox. WebPage workshop and W3Schools were occasionally referenced. SafariTest was used to generate the screenshots.

The author
These templates were all designed by JG, who can be reached via disintersted at gmail.