First thing came to my mind when I heard about My Site competition was to change the look and feel of my site. So I explored a bit, read articles about customization, did lot of googling on SharePoint customization and finally tried to change look of My Site using SharePoint Designer(SPD) running in a VPC.
It was really tiring to use SPD on a VPC as you have to click menu and then wait for it to appear and then click another option and wait for it to be completed. So I thought of changing the look of My Site without using the SharePoint Designer. Again I did lot of googling and found that all I had to do was to change my default.master to change the look of My Site. And I also found couple of other things for customizing any SharePoint site. This is how I customized my site:
1. First of all I’ve searched for some readymade master pages so that I don’t have to do much change. ( also I not very good with CSS ) And to my surprise I found some master pages on Microsoft download site itself.(Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Sample: Example Master Pages)
2. After downloading them I tested one of them by applying it on my site. It didn’t worked at first but then I did some changes in the default.master and the CSS stylesheets using notepad and once again tested them and all was working fine now.
3. Another thing that I changed is “Fade in image slide show” in place of my profile picture. Now to this I searched and found this article to do so using flash. (Adding Flash Animations To SharePoint). Tried and tested this but the problem here was how to make flash animations of my pictures in flash. So I then thought about doing that using JavaScript! Again did googling and found this here (A Fade-In image slideshow using the Fade Filter). So I did small changes in the script and put that into my default.aspx page in place of my profile image. (Using SPD).
4. I also wanted to write custom content to my site page but the content editor web part wasn’t available. So what I did was I used RSS readed web part and filled it with my WordPress blog RSS feed.
