Blogger Formatting

I've created a look and feel for my website,  but my blog is hosted by blogger so I couldn't plug it into the same framework.  Hence the look and feel was different.  I don't want anything flashy, just a standard blog, so I've been attempting to wade into creating my own blogger template.  The online documentation on page elements and widget tags, are insufficient for actually creating your own template.  There is no documentation on the widget types, or the data items available in the templating language of your page.  I've searched the web and found a couple of blog postings of "how tos" on creating your own templates, they were all far from complete.

To attempt to solve this, I've started with a standard template and am making minimal transformations, and it has now ended up looking mostly like the rest of the blog.  But it was done via a lot of manual effort.  It would be nice if blogger had a standard templating language, that was I could share it between my blog and the rest of my website.  I will continue my research to see if I can find anything more.

Where Do They Walk Upside Down?

I remember in some cartoons the other side of the Earth being presented as people walking upside down.  Typically a character would fall through a hole in the Earth.   For some reason this was often presented as China. As I grew up in New York, I presumed that if I ever fell through a bottomless pit, I would end up further south– maybe Australia or New Zealand.

Turns out I would have ended up in the Indian Ocean: in the same general vicinity of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight.   In fact most of the United State is opposite the Indian Ocean.  The only exception I can find is Hawai'i is opposite Botswana.  Who knew?

This is what I did when home sick on Sunday in October.  I used the Google Maps API, to do reverse Geocoding.  This worked pretty well, I could get the current latitude and longitude, invert and add 180º, and see where I end up.  The maps API made it simple to select spots on the map, and look up addresses at different levels of granularity.  The only problem I found, is that I couldn't reverse-geocode, to oceans or geographic features.  There has to be a location for that data somewhere.  I will have to search.

Mobile Test

Sitting home ill on a Sunday, I am playing with my website.  I have it working mostly as I want it to.  A couple of shortcomings still.  The biggest shortcoming is the lack of content. That I will attempt to fix next.

I've got a busy couple months ahead of me: Some of it personal, travel, and hobbies.  Maybe some of that will show up here...