My New About Me Page

I have never been satisfied with Blogger's profile functionality: it is pretty limited in what you can write about yourself and it is in the Blogger theme, which I think looks kind of tacky. So I've been thinking about coming up with a better solution for quite a while and have finally done it.

I created a new About Me page which you can get to from the link under my picture at the right. Blogger doesn't allow you to upload any webpages other than a post, so I designed my own webpage patterned after my blog theme and hosted it on DropBox. I've worked pretty hard to make the theme and links work seamlessly with blogger: you wouldn't even know you left blogger except for the URL.

I've found DropBox to be a really useful tool for this and with other complications when working with Blogger. Blogger does not let you upload a number of things: they don't allow a place to upload a background image, additional webpages, or files (like PDFs) for downloading. I've gotten around all of these with Dropbox. Dropbox installs a client on your computer(s) that syncs a folder in your My Documents folder with their server. You can use it for syncing files between computers, keeping revisional backups of those files, and you can make any of these synchronized files available to the public very easily via a URL. The interface is very easy to use. Right now it is hosting my background picture as well as my new About Me page.

The contact form on that page took me an especially long time to make. It is powered by EmailMe Form. You can design a form on their site to send the data in the form to an email address. It works really well. The biggest problem I found with their forms were that they were not as customizable as I would have liked. If you know a little bit of HTML you can get around this, though. I spent a while customizing what their site generated for me and I think it turned out quite well.

I expect I'll probably update the About Me page every so often. But at this point I think it is pretty good.