Just as Blogger turned to its userbase to supply alternative templates for Blogger blogs, they are now once again running a contest, this time for their upcoming site upgrade.
In fact, from the document's title bar ("Blogger - Template Contest"), I'd say they used the old contest page as a template.
Why do Blogger's design work for free? Their answer:
If your design is chosen (and all you need to do is create a treatment or two, not go through a million revisions and code it—unless you want to), you'll get our eternal graditude...oh, and some stuff that's actually worth something: For one thing, you'll get credit on the site for as long as we use your design. That's to an audience of upwards of 150,000 unique visitors a day. Plus, some other prizes (we're still assembling the package...but don't let that hold you up).I'm kinda interested in the site map and creative brief they offer to show participants, but it looks like the application is off-line just now.
categories: bloggerz fireweaver metablog
5:49:56 PM 
say what []
If you change the names of the categories and ignore the greater context (creating a multiauthor channel by subscribing to multiple feeds in an aggregator and posting them to a single category), the tutorial should explain making new categories for any Radio user reasonably well.
To check it out, you can start with Step 1. Peeking under the hood (just a little).
categories: salonika metablog radioactive
1:41:43 PM say what []
I meant to link to Scot's recent O'Reilly blog article about tweaking MT to make it power a news site for the students in the Berkeley J-School IP Weblog class, but like so many interesting articles lately, I let that one escape me as I juggle multiple responsibilities.
Today, Dave Winer posts a response to Scot's article, suggesting a more bloggy approach to solving the same problem:
They were trying to make Movable Type behave like a news publishing system, where system managers and content engineers do the production work, and reporters and editors write and keep their hands off the editorial system. But but, if it's a weblogs class, that's wrong. They should all be doing weblogs, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe I'm missing something.Not sure why Dave included his stock picture of Lessig, though? Is it because of the intellectual-property focus of the class?
(BTW, techn note, Radio is working great in Navigator, a.k.a., Chimera on my OS X tiMac.)
categories: metablog movablefeats
9:10:42 AM say what []
I wonder if the libertarian-right pundit sector of the blogosphere is to this year's elections as the dittohead talk-radio shows were to those of 1994?
Meanwhile, the gloating and the whining are already running rampant. Tacitus bemoans the sour grapes from the left.
As a moderate-leftist who is usually disgusted by the behavior of both parties, I didn't have much to be happy about this time around, even within our little California bubble (but they say politics and culture sweep west to east in this country, so maybe you'll all be getting your own graydavisbots sometime soon).
It was interesting to see Trent Lott with his newish grayish wig being very conciliatory on one of the morning bloviation shows, and the guy (I'm forgetting his name without regret) at the special edition of the 700 Club fairly gloating and predicting a huge stock-market rally, no doubt a sign of God's favor.
Meanwhile, closer to home, Berkeley voted 70% to force local coffee houses to serve only "fair trade" coffee by the cup. You can still get your beans off the backs of the peasantry, though, so don't worry.
And here in Oakland we seem to have voted for a bunch of weird "temporary" tax increases to fight violence. The odd thing is they jacked up the downtown parking tax by half a percent and another tax by some similar tiny increment but the third hike is a 3% increase for single-room occupancy hotels. Which means that we are raising taxes on bums at six times the rate that we are commuters and business people!
Back nationally, I will be curious to see if the Democrats keep triming themselves into irrelevancy or decide that if they really are the opposition and they really are out of power that they should maybe consider presenting a coherent alternate agenda.
After the next two years we should either have a completely stabilized Republican hegemony in place or a massive repudiation of overweening hubris at the polls next time.
categories: metablog outspoken
7:59:25 AM say what []
