Yes I have done it !!! Finally I have almost successfully able to port the award winning Connections theme for blogger. It was developed by Patricia and Sadish for wordpress.

Porting it to Blogger was not a easy task as i have thought initially. As 99% of times I use firefox for browsing purpose, hence while porting it to blogger I have ignored the fact that there are a lots of people who will be using poorer browser like Internet Explorer.

My personal experience shows that IE sux big times in n number of stuffs. Its blotted support for CSS2 is one of them. It makes my ported theme almost useless in IE. There are a number of hacks available. But being a novice in the arena of CSS I couldn't fix it in the way it should be.

Another problem in my blogger frontpage adds spice to the problem. Usually I edit the HTML of the post before posting to blogger. Somethimes it shows error about some tags not closed. Rarely I ignore it and just post it with bad formed html. Unfortunately one of the such badly formed post is present in the man page. I just couldn't find out that badly formed post and rectify it. Firefox render it as expected even with badly formed html. Even with IE's reputation (or ill-reputation !!!) of rendering badly formed html tags, my page's sidebar is rendered with smaller font than it is expected due to one unclosed font tag (most probably).

To make my theme usable I use an simple trick. I use microsoft's proprietary conditional inclusion tag to make IE render the page as a table instead. It is a nice trick since other browser are not stupid enough (as IE) to read between comments to check whether there are some information or not. Here is a a sample of it to get a feel of it.

<!--[if IE]>
    You are still using IE !!!
<[end if]-->


The trick is that IE will render the text within this comment while firefox will not. So my problem got solved. All I need is to put a number of such conditional comments to insert table for IE and alas.. it worked.

I lively example of the theme is presented in this page itself. What still remains to be done to make it publishable is to host images and css at some server and post it in a post. I will do it in near future.

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