Putting A Spanner In The Works

I'm really not a luddite, I have no problem with new technical inventions that make life easier or cheaper. What I object to is using technology simply for the sake of it, when the result is inferior to what there was before. Unfortunately, in my view, a lot of recent "innovations" on blogger seem to fall into this second category. Today my object of hate is dynamic views.

Dynamic views are a nice way of showcasing the new web standards, HTML5 and CSS3, but personally I think they are horrible. In my experience they are slow to load (and believe me my machine ranks above average on CPU and memory), and they remove any sense of individuality from the blogs on which they are used. Whilst the presentation shouldn't be as important as the content, I think we all judge books by their covers and blogs by their layout. Unfortunately once a blog owner has decided to use dynamic layouts us as readers have no option to view the original template unless we turn off JavaScript. Unfortunately, if you turn off JavaScript you will be able to see the main page of the blog using the normal template but you won't be able to look at older posts and none of the widgets will work. Fortunately the rest of this post introduces a solution that means if you hate dynamic views as much as I do you can banish them for good!

When you turn JavaScript off Blogger doesn't gracefully show you the old template for a dynamic blog. What it does is give you a link to the front page of the blog with ?v=0 appended to the end. It turns out that adding v=0 to the query string of the URL for any page within a blog causes it to be displayed using the old template. Unfortunately Blogger doesn't re-write the links in a page when you add v=0 to the URL, so they all point back to the dynamic view. And even if you have JavaScript turned off they just send you back to the homepage not the actual page you wanted to look at. This is a horrid mess, but it does give us a way of fixing things.

My solution is a GreaseMonkey script that runs as the page loads, redirects you away from the dynamic view and back to the original template pages and re-writes all the out going links, where necessary, to include the v=0 parameter so that they all just work. If you use Firefox then you will need to install the GreaseMonkey addon before you can use the script, if you use Google Chrome then support for GreaseMonkey scripts is built in. Once you are ready you can install my script by clicking this link. Currently it will only be applied to blogspot hosted blogs so unfortunately you might still see the odd dynamic view blog (Blogger Buzz for example) but hopefully there shouldn't be too many.

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for improvements, and certainly links to any blogspot hosted blogs where you still see the dynamic views.

Threaded Comments

It would appear that a few days ago Blogger introduced another new feature to our blogs: threaded comments.

Now while I actually quite like the idea (much like the lightbox fiasco) it has been introduced as the default if you use an embedded comment form and publish full feeds. The other problem (and the one that affected this blog) is that the HTML elements and CSS styles used to display the comments have changed, which (depending on your template) might mean that they look different or even wrong. So while I quite like the idea here are two little tips that might make life easier.

Firstly, let's assume that while they display correctly you just don't like threaded comments and want to turn them off. This is actually easily achievable with following piece of CSS.

.comment-actions {
   display: none;
}

You need to add this to your blog template, either by editing the HTML of your template and adding it anywhere inside a style element, or by going to advanced in the Template Designer where you can add arbitrary CSS. Essentially this just removes the reply link, so to leave a comment everyone is forced to use the main comment form at the bottom of the post. This has, however, the unfortunate side effect of also removing the default delete comment link. Personally I don't think that's too much of an issue as it is easy to moderate comments through the dashboard. If I have the time I'll try and figure out how to reinstate the delete link and then I'll publish another post explaining how.

On this blog I actually don't mind the comments being threaded, but I do mind them not displaying properly, which is exactly what was happening. When I customized the template I use for this blog I added some CSS styles to control how blockquotes appear. I wasn't intending to use them for structure within the template so I styled them to look like an actual quote. You can see the styles in action in this post where I quote part of an e-mail. The problem is that blogger are now using blockquote to layout comments. This meant that each comment was styled in the same way as that e-mail quote, and because the surrounding context was different the comments were actually overlapping one another slightly. All in all it looked pretty horrible. Fortunately there is an easy fix. Because I know that I only want to use my styles within the body of a post I can limit the CSS to only applying within that section of the page by prefixing the style with .post-body as the post is always contained within a div with the class post-body. So my three blockquote styles now look like.

.post-body blockquote {
   font-style: italic;
   width: 500px;
   margin: 0 auto;
   text-align: justify;
}

.post-body blockquote:before {
   display:block;
   content: open-quote;
   font-size: 300%;
   height: 0;
   margin-left: -0.8em;
}

.post-body blockquote:after {
   display: block;
   font-size: 300%;
   content: close-quote;
   margin-top: -0.8em;
   margin-left: 500px;
}

Of course depending on the template you use you may have different problems that show up because of the new comment system so you may need to experiment a little to find exactly what CSS tricks you need to apply to put things back the way they were before Blogger introduced the new feature/bug (delete as you see fit).