One blog seven views

Do you embrace change or are you someone who needs to be dragged through any itsy bit of change? Or are you, like me, a wait-and-see kind of person? I'm referring to technological changes in particular in the internet.

Have you heard? Blogger now provides seven dynamic views for your blog. What does that mean? It means that a reader now has the option to view a Blogger blog content in seven different ways. That is, if the blog owner has enabled the dynamic view ability. Right now, I have not enabled the dynamic view for a few reasons which I'll go into later. But I'll give you a preview of what my blog could look like in future. Yes, sort of like a crystal ball.

But before that, dynamic views only work if:

• Your blog is public. Meaning no sign-in.
• Your blog feeds are fully enabled. In the Settings | Site feed tab, you have enabled either Full or Jump Break for your Post Feed.

Here's the preview of the seven views of my blog:

Classic View

The classic view is pretty much what you're used to already. Except for one very important extra - infinite scrolling. Infinite scrolling means scrolling through the pages without having to click on a page or "older posts". And even after clicking on a specific post, infinite scrolling is still possible because you are really looking at one big giant page.

Flipcard view

You either love or hate the flipcard view. It's great for blogs with lots of pics. Each pic points to a blog post. Infinite scrolling works when you are in the flipcard view - meaning you could scroll through the images. But once you've clicked on a specific post, you only see one post and the infinite scrolling is lost until you close the post and go back to the flipcard view.

Magazine view

I'm not impressed by the magazine view. I don't really care how the posts are laid out. Other than the layout, it's similar to flipcard. Once you click on a specific post, the infinite scrolling ability is gone.

Mosaic view

I can't tell the difference between flipcard and mosaic. The funtions are similar.

Sidebar view

Sidebar view looks promising. However infinite scrolling only works on the sidebar. I'm getting obsessed with infinite scrolling!

Snapshot view

In Snapshot view, all the pics of each post is shown. Other than this difference, it has the same functions as Snapshot and Mosaic.

Timeslide view

Timeslide view is a blogger's dream. It pulls together all posts by the month. Reading all my posts through the years won't be so hard then!

What do you think of the seven dynamic views? Which ones do you like? One other thing you probably didn't get from the images of the above views is this: The reader gets to choose the view. It's totally in her control.

If you own a Blogger blog and would like to preview the dynamic views of your blog, you can go here to enter your blog name and it's totally safe, no worries. Look for the word "Preview".

Before you excitedly go off to enable dynamic views for your Blogger blog, let me tell you the reasons why I haven't done it for mine.

• The sidebar disappears along with all my ads and widgets.
  
• The header looks different and my header ad disappears.
  

Once Blogger rolls out the option to customise the header and sidebar, I'm in. Until then, I'm sticking to my static view.

You know what I wished Blogger had done instead? Allowed the blog owner the option to limit the views for her blog. I really like to have control over what the reader sees. Of the seven views, I believe most of my readers will just use Classic or, Sidebar. Those new to my blog might go for Timeslide.

p.s. If you're enabling dynamic view for your blog, I beg you - please keep a copy of your BEFORE template. At least if you don't like your new look, you can always revert.