Thursday, March 31, 2011

Blogger Dynamic Views: Not Ready For Prime Time

Many of you were informed when you logged in to your own blogs about Blogger Dynamic Views, an assortment of different views readers can use to view the same content. This blog meets all the specified criteria I can find, and all the settings are correct, but all I see when I try to use a view is the equivalent of "you can't do that." Maybe I'll try again in a month or so when they have the bugs worked out.

5 comments:

  1. A month? You think Blogger will have bugs fixed in a month?

    One of the benefits of moving to my own space is that I got to keep my archives.

    During the Blogger 1.0 to Blogger 2.0 conversion they wiped them out, and my log in.

    It's a free service, and not the worse software I've ever used, but it is not without problems.

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  2. Bryan, I strongly suspect the problem is that Blogger neglected to list explicitly some criterion for compatibility with the feature, a criterion they simply assumed, and that "fixing" the problem will involve little more than listing the criterion.

    The feature demonstrably works on their own blog, so it's not in and of itself FUBAR.

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  3. Bryan, one other thing... this is not a feature I feel I simply must have. None of the new views are even particularly suited to my material. And I'm too old and tired to go to the hassle of remaking my blog one more time. So I'm stuck with what works in Blogger.

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  4. Steve, in general Blogger's new features only work with a "prestine" template. If you've touched your template's CSS code in any way, you have to revert to one of their "prestine" templates to use the new features.

    Bryan, Blogger now has the ability to export your archives to your own server. I used to run my own blog on my own software on my own server, but it was always a PITA to keep the software updated and insure I always had a version of MySQL that the blogging software could deal with (because usually it didn't like the one that the Linux distribution auto-updated to when I turned on the auto-updates) and yada yada yada and the comment spammers drove me batty, so now I let Blogger handle all that. It's not as if anything on my blog is historically important anyhow...I still have all the old posts from my original (2002 vintage) blog, but really, some things are better off left dead.

    - Badtux the Blogging Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  5. BadTux, see my post downstream, titled "More On Blogger Dynamic Views". By a straightforward process of elimination, I discovered that the problem was in having my Site Feed set to Advanced mode. I changed it to Basic mode and all the new views worked fine. Not that they're worth a great deal to me, but they do work now. Add /view to the URL and you'll be shown Sidebar view, plus a button dropdown (sic) that lets you change the view.

    My best guess is that Blogger generates all those views from the feed. FAIK, it may generate the regular standard blog page that way, too: build the feed first and then generate... something, a standard page or a view, from it. Why it doesn't work with the so-called Advanced feed is not something I intend to explore.

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