Google's blogging service,
Blogger, allows users to easily create professional looking blogs easily and for free. At the recent tech conference called South by Southwest, Google announced an entire
new interface for it's Blogger platform. This new interface with be cleaner and more simple.
Although the new Blogger interface is not yet in effect, some small new features have been introduced slowly by Google. The newest, and probably one of the biggest, new feature in Blogger is the new ways to view a Blogger blog. This new update brings five new layouts to any Blogger bog, and can be seen by adding a "/view to the end of any Blogger blogs's URL. For example, to view this blog in any of the five new formats, go to
gadgetatorblog.blogspot.com/view.
The new formats are called Flipcard, Mosaic, Sidebar, Snapshot, and Timeslide. All of these show the blog posts in different ways. For example, Flipcard is just all of the posts arranged a little squares in a grid that flip around when you mouse over them, while Timeslide is all of the posts in three side by side lists, each smaller than the one before it, going by date.
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| Flipcard |
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| Mosaic |
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| Sidebar |
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| Snapshot |
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| Timeslide |
A lot of these views are almost completely based on pictures, for example, in Snapshot mode, any posts without pictures won't even show up. One of the problems with this is that although Blogger allows you to add pictures to your posts just by entering the photo's URL, any photos that were inserted like this will not show up in any of these viewing modes. I personally have used mostly only photos directly from the web, and plan on downloading them all and reposting them in my blog.
This is definitely a step towards what Blogger showed off at South By Southwest, it gives any blog a cleaner a simpler interface, and it is something that you probably will see on a lot of blogs very soon.
