it's a beautiful redesign, ben. great job (ben's buddy)!
do you mind if i make the suggestion that you consider playing with the line-spacing for the body text? right now it's really very close together - and not huge - so less legible for me than i would like. i think it would makeit much easier to read!
Probably not as fancy as MOKB's but works for me. Haven't put any ads on the sidebars yet but after reading comments here maybe will one of these days...
send Dodge an email and ask him if he had the same problems... Damn templates can be a pain in the ass and they don't all work the same depending on platform and browser type....
The other two.... one was a standard layout from blogger.
The other was one I found on a random blogger site that I spent about 2 days changing up. In the end, I'm really happy with how this one turned out. CSS zen garden has a TON of great designs that you can muck with, which is what we did, especially considering the original was this one.
I liked the green one a lot, but I got some complaints about how on smaller resolutions it was harder to read. And I know this is so petty, but I felt like I was writing less because there was so much space for text. I'd write what felt like a page and it would come out as less than a paragraph.
DIY, the three column layouts I have seen have the body and left toolbar load as {float: left;} and they call up the sidebar and then the body in the index.php document, or in the php section. It's still an extremely tricky thing to do correctly, it always causes problems for me. Also you always have to make sure your pictures / media in the body section aren't larger than the body itself, or IE will go apeshit on you and put your body at the bottom of the page.
My guess is he used photoshop since 1) its the best program ever and 2) it has a number of built in effects and filters like the one on the ninja truck.
Ben you may have on your hands the coolest ninja truck since this one: