Google's Response To Our Post On Dynamic Views

Last year in September 2011, Blogger Team launched Dynamic views which offered seven different ways to share your blog with your readers. Few months later in December 2011 we pin pointed some of the flaws linked with these new graphical interfaces. We mentioned 10 reasons to avoid blogger dynamic views. The post highlighted both pros and cons of using these new themes and focused mainly on whether these new layouts are optimized enough and whether or not they can be monetized and customized. As a response Blogger software engineer, Antin Harasymiv, who announced the launch of these interactive new layouts commented on our post and shared some of the recent developments and major changes applied to these new non-traditional templates.

Based on strong reader feedback and suggestions we have decided to roll out series of tutorials on monetizing, optimizing and customizing these Dynamically controlled layouts which include FlipCard, Magazine, Sidebar, Snapshot, timeslide, Mosaic and Classic. The tutorials will share tips to solve most needed problems faced by a vast majority of bloggers who switch to these views just because they want to manage their templates in a more easy non-techy way. Lets look on what points we highlighted contradictory to Dynamic views and how Antin clarified several of those points.

Our 10 Reasons:

Following are the reasons we put forward:

1. Does not support Adsense Integration  - Now supported
2. No Widget Support - Slight widget support
3. (3a) No Edit HTML Option- Point still valid
4. (3b) Dynamic views are not SEO friendly - Luckily now spiders can crawl and index Ajax controlled and iframe controlled commenting systems. Robots can even index and crawl Facebook comments and Disqus and intense debate.
5. Loss of Page views and Page impressions - No more now because now the entire page load upon refresh or page switching. Instead the recent updates have shoot up Pageviews thus skyrocketing Adsense revenue!
6. Browser Compatibility issues - Works fine now on IE8+ and latest browsers
7. Jump Break Does not work - Point valid but read Antin's reply to this for knowing why
8. No Professional Touch - Point still valid if you are looking forward for attracting direct advertisers and long term blog promotion for commercial purpose.
9. No SMO support - Though Facebook, Google+ and twitter plugins show below posts but support for other social media networking buttons is not yet present like the latest in market : Pinterest
10. Can not add Custom drop down menu: Point still valid although you can display default list menu
11. No Favicon support - Fortunately favicon can now be easily changed.

Blogger Reply To Above Points:

Following is a copy of the comprehensive comment left by blogger software engineer Antin Harasymiv who is actively involved in the development of Dynamic views. On a random search I found out a dynamic view template fully modified and customized by Antin that displays post in a style you might have never seen before.  It uses HTML5, AJAX and CSS3 latest web technologies to display posts in a unique style. You can visit it at life by Antin.

Hi. Thanks for taking the time to produce this list, and we've been working hard to address many, if not most of your concerns. In fact I think 1, 2, 3b (you had two 3s), 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10 are all resolved.
However before I go through the list, let me first reassure everyone that the other templates are not going away. We will not force anyone to use a Dynamic View, and while we feel they have a lot to offer, we understand that they are not for everyone.
We will continue to improve and add to Dynamic Views, much as we continue to improve and add to the rest of Blogger. Pick whichever template you like the most, or customize one from scratch.

#1 No AdSense DV has AdSense support, and has had it from the start. If you have set up AdSense the various views will incorporate ads for you, generally two for each post.

#2 No Widget support We added widget support earlier in the year, and have continued to roll out more widgets:
http://buzz.blogger.com/2012/02/dynamic-views-update-3-gadgets.html

#3 No Edit HTML Unfortunately not with these templates. We're looking at ways to enable this, but for the moment they are a little more restrictive. As I say, the other templates are not going away so if this is important they are the best option for the moment.

#3 Not SEO Friendly It seems you had two points for 3... the good news is this is not, and has never been, an issue. We made sure that the DV works well for SEO, by implementing Google's recommendations for AJAX-crawling:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
We have also carefully annotated the template with schema.org which will help with snippeting when sharing to social networks like Google+.

#4 Loss of Pageviews due to AJAX As you infinite scroll or click on posts we send beacons to both Google Analytics (if you have enabled it) as well as the Blogger Stats. Rest assured, all the impressions are being tracked for you, and perhaps even more accurately than before.

#5 Browser Compatability Dynamic Views is tested on the two most recent versions of each major Browser (eg both IE8 and IE9). It should behave correctly on all modern browsers, and we recommend using a mobile template for smartphones.

#6 Jump Break does not work Dynamic Views requires that your blog be set to enable "full feeds". It uses the feeds to get the post content. If you do not have full feeds enabled we cannot get the full post via AJAX, but if you do use jump breaks we try and respect them on views like Magazine and Timeslide that use snippets.

#7 No Professional Touch I like to feel that we have applied a professional touch for you, but I think what you are getting at is there is not a large amount of customization? Yes, that is undeniably true. You can tweak a lot of things through the Template Designer, both colors, but also with custom CSS.
As I say, DV is not for everyone, but a lot of people do not have the time, or inclination, to make a custom design, and we have tried to help by providing some interesting (and dare we say 'dynamic') ways to present your blog.

#8 Not SMO friendly (other social networks) We have supported the biggest social networks, and would love to extend to more as we continue to find ways for you to customize DV. In the interim however we did not want to overly clutter the blog.

#9 Cannot add Drop Down Menu
I do not really understand how this differs to the custom HTML complaint. Although you can add navigation through custom pages, or the various list widgets.

#10 No Favicon, No logo Again, DV has had this since launch. You can change the logos through the Template Designer (set a Header Image), and the Favicon through the settings:
http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/08/latest-updates-august-1st.html

We thank Antin for working so dedicatedly on DV project and we would love to hear his thoughts in future too.  We just hope the points mentioned above and the clear responses are self explanatory and answers most of your questions and doubts related to DV.

Shall you switch to Dynamic Views Now?

We mentioned it pretty clearly on all our posts that it depends on how you wish to blog. If you are a nature lover and love to gather all your memories in an online diary then of course Ads and blog ranking wont matter a lot for you because your readership would be selected and specific. But if you are looking to make a living out of your blog and take this hobby seriously by helping people or by promoting your brand or product then we would strongly recommend that you stick to Simple design which offers you several ways to customize and monetize your blog to reach a wider audience and blog sponsors. Design counts a lot after blog traffic stats and ranking in the eyes of advertisers, therefore to give a professional tongue your content you will have to dress up your content in standard blog themes. All remaining templates can be fully customized. At present blogger offers six different categories of templates which include:

1. Simple
2. Picture Window
3. Awesome Inc.
4. Watermark
5. Ethereal
6. Travel

You may choose any of them and later replace them with a magazine style template of your choice.

To view your blog in a dynamic view simply replace the URL below with yours and you may replace the word sidebar with any of 7 views available,

http://www.mybloggertricks.com/view/sidebar

Blogger team recently added a new search functionality to dynamic views which display search results based in relevancy unlike just in chronological order

Please let us know what would you like to see in our future tutorials on DV and which topics should be covered first. Mention any of the problems you may be facing so far and share your valuable suggestions to help us bring something worth trying and implementing. Do take good care of yourselves and your loved ones. Peace and blessings pals. :)

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Mohammad 5/23/2012