To understand how a Blogger Template works, you will use the backup template you created in Lesson One.

Open the Notepad file. I hope you saved it with a descriptive title like MyTemplate9232005.txt. Because if you saved it as Stuff.txt, oy veh, I don't know what I'll do with you. Anyway, open MyTemplate9232005.txt in Notepad.

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Click on File and go to Save As...

You are going to save the template in HTML format, in order to view it as a webpage template. Which is what it is. You will use the drop-down menu to set "Save as type" to All Files, and then type in html as the extension on the file name. So you are creating a copy of MyTemplate9232005.txt with the name MyTemplate9232005.html. The file will contain the same data, but will behave very differently. The extension -- the letters after the dot -- determine how a file behaves.

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I hope you are making sure you know where you save your documents. You may want to save them to the desktop for quick access. Create a folder named "Blogger Files" and save them all in there. (A good desktop is not cluttered. It has only the essentials: Asteroids, Tempest, Freecell and a working files folder.)

Now you have used the Save As function to save your template text file as an HTML file.

But how will you know which is the text file and which is the HTML file? Windows, by default, hides file extensions. But your text file with have a notepad icon - the page with lines; the HTML file will have a browser icon, typically the Internet Explorer e on a white background.

Double-click on the HTML file to view your Blog template in its purity -- just form, no content.

do I need to say it again?

As you can see, Blogger templates are web pages. They are web pages that use variables to plug in content. The variables are between the dollar signs. In future lessons, you will learn exactly what these variable do and how to tweak or replace them.