Default theme for CS blog is good and presents information OK, but it’s too boring. It’s very simple and while simplicity is often the best way to go, this default theme reminds me of MSDN online library too much. I’ve been developing for several years and had to look in the MSDN a lot, so not long ago I decided it’s time to change the look. I’ve quickly glanced at other skins that came with CS 1.0 and figured that there has to be something better out there. I also wanted to add more custom data to the blog web page, but quickly found out that all templates are generic and it’s impossible to custom modify skin for a certain blog. In contrast Blogger allows the user to select one of the predefined themes providing support to customize it at the same time. Of course, if a new skin is chosen for the blog all modifications get lost. Still it’s much better than what CS has to offer.

Anyhow, I’ve figured that there has to be more information and more skins available for CS on the Internet. I started looking at http://docs.communityserver.org/, but while it did provide a little bit of information there were too many holes in the way skinning works in CS for me to write my own. Next, looking through the CS forum, I found http://cs.ferncrk.com/blogs/stuart/archive/2005/03/21/blogskintutorial0.aspx, which is a first article in a series on how to write a custom skin for the CS blog, and http://www.sagetechnology.com/Default.aspx?tabid=173, a website with a list of CS resources. There I stumbled across BlueCurve (http://blog.salamandersoftware.co.uk/archive/2005/03/06/432.aspx), a great skin by Derek Lakin. He originally created the skin for .Text and has recently adopted it for the usage with CS. Here’s his original  post with the skin for .Text - http://blog.salamandersoftware.co.uk/archive/2005/01/05/358.aspx.

The skin is nice and is very cool looking. Derek did an amazing job with it. Still it has a couple of problems. It works OK in Mozilla, but in IE the layout of the banner gets broken and some of the buttons or blog description would appear outside of the banner. Another problem is that there is no visual separation between paragraphs in the posts.

The first problem was due to the way IE handles floating elements, which is different from how Mozilla handles them. In a word I added {clear: both;} to each of the button groups in the banner to make them behave the same way they do in Mozilla. To fix the blog description I did the same thing to it, plus made the width of the description elemen the same width as the banner and centered the text inside.