There's no point blogging up a storm if you don't look good while you're at it.  I owe a huge shout-out to Josh Ledgard, fellow MSDN blogger, who taught me how to pimp out Community Server, the .NET-based blogging engine that powers blogs.msdn.com.

Actually, I owe him more than that, since I've borrowed heavily from his great css stylesheet.  The new look my blog is sporting beats Bog Standard Blue, that's for sure :) 

// TODO: Personalize stylesheet further when time permits

[Update: Josh Ledgard's 'Pimping Community Server Blogs 101' follows.]

  • Find other blogs [on MSDN] whose style you like to find a good basic theme, or browse the theme selection on your blog in the Settings page [in the Control Panel]. Open the HTML on a blog user's page to see what basic theme they are using. You can see this near the 6th line of the HTML that starts with <link rel="stylesheet".
  • Download that theme’s style sheet. For this blog, and Josh's, that link is:
  • Using the Community Server Settings menu, change your blog's base theme to the base theme of the blog you chose.
  • Start playing with the CSS Overrides.
    • What you’ll notice when you open up the CSS styles is that each style sheet can override the one before it.  The last set of styles applied are your custom ones (step (c) above).
  • Look at CSS sheets (a) and (b) to find out what you want to change, and start experimenting trial and error by tweaking things one at a time.  When you need to know what properties are available for an object type like a list item ( <li> ), do a web search for "CSS LI Properties" and you’ll find a ton of pages that show you all the tweaks you can make to the list items.  The free Visual Web Developer Express also has AutoComplete on .CSS to help you find and work with those properties.