Blogger

I have been a blogger user since 2009. I set it up when I moved to New Brunswick as a way to share and stay in touch with family. I am comfortable with it and thus chose to do my summative project as a blog.

Mosaic view on my personal blog.

There was only one wrench thrown in the process. Blogger has recently released dynamic views, which are a series of new templates that layout and display your blog in dynamic new ways. Originally I set up ICTyler with the mosaic dynamic view. It makes thumbnails of your posts. If you have a picture it uses it, otherwise it highlights the initial text, and arranges them in mosaic form. The size and position vary slightly each time you come to the blog. I really enjoy it. However, with dynamic view templates there is a header bar that enables users to switch between all seven views at their leisure. If I were to stick with dynamic views I would lose control of how my blog would be presented to the world. I found a way to potentially overcome this though. In the advanced template setting I can change the dynamic view bar background and font colour. I set them to be the same and when people visit the blog they are none the wiser.

So, I'm feeling confident. I have a hip, new layout and it's going to stay that way. Then I remember gadgets. I remember labels, blogrolls, rss feeds and all the great sidebar content possible in blogger. Dynamic views does not have this. Why have I been labelling posts? How can I share useful resources with everyone who comes to the blog, without them having to somehow find the right post?

It was for this reason I switched back to one of the original templates. I modified it to my liking and have been able to add twitter feeds I feel are valuable resources. Posts can be organized via the archives or the label cloud. I hope to add a useful link bar, blogroll and slideshow of my pictures among other things. I think the many uses of gadgets outweighs a flashy layout for what I want to accomplish here.