Wednesday, February 22, 2012

New Look, Same Great Taste?

I decided that it was time to change up the old blog a bit. I recently read an article (no, I can't remember where I read it at sadly) that was going on about making your blog look professional. Or people wouldn't take you seriously. To not change the layout every couple weeks or so. And to that I said HA!

What's the point of your blog looking the same all the time? It gets boring seeing the same background, the same layout, the same color scheme all the time. Every day. I like my blog to be more personal. To kind of embody who I am. And I'm a bit chaotic. I change a lot. I have trouble sticking with one thing. And something as simple as changing the way my blog looks makes that easier.

I think I even put in the About section that this blog (as well as myself) was going to be chaotic and crazy and wild and unpredictable. Why not show some of that in the look and layout of the blog.

So if you're reading this you will have noticed I did in fact change the blog. A lot! I threw out the old template entirely and decided to try out one of the dynamic views. I set it on the Sidebar one. So as you can see to the left it will have the titles of my posts. Which you can scroll down and click on and then the post opens in the main section of the blog. Then you can do all the normal share stuff at the bottom, comment and what have you. Then if you look above the post titles on the left you see a drop down thing that has all the different dynamic views and you can freely switch between them if you don't like the Sidebar one I chose.

The only ones I liked are this Sidebar one and the Flipcard one. The others seems jumbled and confusing. The other thing I don't like about using a dynamic view is not being able to add gadgets and stuff. Or at least I can't figure out how to do it yet.

5 comments:

  1. I agree with you, the blog layout should reflect you, and if you're ever-changing, why shouldn't the blog layout be? Do what you want, it's yours anyways! And as for the dynamic views, I like them too, but I also wish there was a way for widgets and stuff.

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  2. Google always seems to be a bit slow when adding stuff. I just recently started using twitterfeed.com to auto post my blog posts to both my facebook and twitter. But after an hour of searching for a way to do the same to G+ I found nothing. Apparently Google hasn't released some thingy (the API whatever that is) that allows third party companies to allow auto posting to G+.

    You'd think that they would integrate that with Blogger. I know that they brought out the thing where after you publish it asks you if you want to share to G+. But I don't believe I have that option on my app. With twitterfeed it does a check every half hour to see if I have posted or not. If I have it puts a link up on my social networks for me.

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    1. I wish there was a way to dual-post entire blogger entries on G+ so that the blog entry and the G+ post were one and the same... i.e. if someone +1's one of them they +1 both because they're the same thing.

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    2. Say you publish a blog post and it is then auto published to G+. If they +1 the actual post then it has one +1. If someone +1's the G+ post with the blog link then that G+ post has one which makes it more relevant in Google searches (is that how it works exactly?) And then people are linked to the blog post . So a +1 on either still adds to the blog I think.

      Hope that made sense. I confused myself along the way! But yes it would be nice if it was all linked together. Come on Google!

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  3. Yeah... the dynamic views don't give me the flexibility I want for my blog design. Hopefully they evolve into something better... as it is though, they're super-nice to navigate and read from!

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