Success with Custom templates

Finally today in the afternoon I managed to make this template I found work !.. I fixed it up for my test blog and during the week hope to have it up on this blog.. Ok too any ardent bloggers who will shrug and call me a loser.. it might be easy for You but it was tough for me. with blogger going and changing some stuff about template formats.
I felt a great sense of jubilation when the template finally looked like it should today.. Here is the link where I found the template.. http://www.jackbook.com
check it out there are plenty of templates out there and a guide to get you started on setting up and running with the new ones.. I will post a guide of some tips I found while trying to get my template to work.. :) this is my test blog check out the template and let me know what you think..
test blog

Trawling For templates

Tired of the same old look of my blog I decided to look around for new templates. Doing a simple google Search just netted me more of the same sort of templates I'm used to seeing. Feeling rather dejected I went to check my Entrecard account and was browsing the categories of blog available and lo and behold I came upon a category on blogging resources. after visiting a few of the blogs there I found some intersting templates that I likes.. I will first test them out and see how it goes :d.. http://blogger-aid.blogspot.com
http://www.jackbook.com
were two of the gold mine of resources that I came across.

Color hexcodes

Hey to all you bloggers who want to know particular color codes to use in customizing your blog design heres a good site to check out
http://www.colorhunter.com

it helped me alot ..(pls take note of my new font color.. :D)

any comments about the new font color or comments about my post is appreciated

TIPHow to adjust the width of your blog post

I am still a novice to blogging and an am still leaning the ropes as it were. I came across this nifty trick that I used on another blog I'm using to display java projects I do for My SCJP certification process(http://tmarajavaescapades.blogspot.com/).In this particular blog the space or width of my blog post was not enough to display the content I uploaded.After doing a Google search I cam across a method of adjusting the CSS template IT is quite straight forward.

Go to your dash board and click on the "Layout" tab and then on the "Template" tab you should then see the CSS template of your blog.. I'm sure you will be familiar with these steps, but in the spirit of trying to be through please bear with me :).
Before you do anything SAVE A COPY OF YOUR TEMPLATE in case of any mishap..
Now in your template sroll thrugh it looking for a section of the code that looks like whats given below

#main-wrapper {
background: $mainBgColor url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/corner_main.gif") no-repeat right top;
width:600px;
//
}
#main {
margin:0;
padding:15px 20px;
}
#sidebar-wrapper {
background:$sidebarBgColor url("http://www.blogblog.com/no897/corner_sidebar.gif") no-repeat left top;
width:154px;
//
}

in the above coding I've marked to lines in red these two lines set the width of your columns the one which comes under "main wrapper" is the one which controls the width of your blog You are free to set it to any amount so long as the sum of the post width and the side bar width are less than the total blog width

well after that you can experiment an dsee what works for you ..happy blogging people
Before I forget.. i should give credit to peter chen for having the original post on ow to this editing for more info GO TO HIS blog (http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com)