Showing posts with label Lightbox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lightbox. Show all posts

Monday, October 17, 2011

Dynamic Templates Are Not For Everybody

The new dynamic views, a truly innovative feature recently developed for Blogger blogs, are still receiving mixed reviews.

Not everybody, able to use them, likes them - and not everybody, liking them, is able to use them. The reasons behind the decisions to use them - or not use them - are fascinating, when examined in proper context.

The most restrictive reason comes from their most major feature - the blog, when displayed, gets the post content from the blog feed, and is published locally on each client computer.

This excludes two groups of blogs - those published with no feed, or with a partial feed - and those published privately. As noted many times, a private blog will not publish a newsfeed.

Depending upon readership, some blogs may have potential readers who are overly concerned with computer security.

In either case - with a blog not publishing a full newsfeed, or with a computer owner who filters web content too strictly, the would be blog viewer sits there, watching the turning gears, instead of reading the blog.

Besides the technical restrictions of private blogs and unavailable newsfeeds, and of computer security, Blogger has made a strategic decision, and disallowed these templates with "Adult Content" blogs.

In addition to the unavailability for some blogs, there are several major design deficiencies - and some deficiencies may be resolved sooner than others.

Besides the use of the blog feed published on the individual computers, the blog, as displayed, is significantly lighter, because the blog feed contains only text and pictures. Various features, important in many blogs, are omitted or restricted - possibly, by design.


For a more obvious demonstration, you may display this blog, in dynamic view. For several of the reasons enumerated above, I'll not make dynamic views the default, for this blog.

The good news is that the dynamic templates are easy to apply, and they are easy to remove - both permanently and temporarily.

Lightbox Returns

In October of this year, Blogger made a major change to the display of images and photos, in our blog posts. As we've seen a few times, this change was not provided as an option - and was not received graciously by all blog owners. After receiving a significant amount of complaints, Blogger removed Lightbox from our blogs image display.

Last week, having redesigned the Lightbox feature, Blogger released it for a second attempt.
Thanks to your feedback, we turned Lightbox off temporarily, and we’re re-launching it today with the option to disable it, along with a handful of fixes to bugs that you reported.
As with any Blogger feature, it now deserves a closer look.

Lightbox is now provided as an option - "Open images in Lightbox". In the Classic GUI, it's selected in Settings - Formatting; in the New GUI (2011), it's selected in Settings - "Posts and comments".


When you click on the image to the left, you will get an overlay, which covers the post display.


As with various similar Google photo displays, you look for the white on black "X", in the upper right corner of the window. Click on the "X" to return to the blog, as previously displayed.

Blogger has stated that the setting enables or disables it for the entire blog.
we've also created an option to disable it per blog
Separately, they also stated that the setting is disabled, by default. You might do well to check your setting at least once, as some folks have found the setting enabled, by default.

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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Lightbox update

When we enabled a brand new photo viewing experience, called Lightbox, by default a few weeks ago, we heard from a number of Bloggers who preferred to use their own, previously installed Lightbox solution, or who simply wanted to continue blogging without the new feature.

Thanks to your feedback, we turned Lightbox off temporarily, and we’re re-launching it today with the option to disable it, along with a handful of fixes to bugs that you reported.

To learn more about Lightbox and how it works, check out the original blog post.

If you’d like to disable Lightbox on your blog, log in to Blogger and select “No” next to Lightbox in the Settings | Posts and Comments section (new interface) or the Settings | Formatting section (old interface).

Thanks again for your detailed suggestions, and please continue to share your feedback in our help forum.

Posted by Marcos Almeida, Software Engineer

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