Rabbit Reevaluated

I haven't done a whole lot with the blog layout since the redesign over a year ago. At least nothing that I've felt worth writing about. One thing that I did nut out a about a month back was the Archives section at the bottom of the page. For a long while you couldn't see any posts further back than a year but now you should be able to navigate all the way to the start, post numero uno that was scribbled back in 2005. Who'd have thought that I would stick to it for this long eh?

I'm starting to think a little bit about kicking off another redesign at some point, especially now that mobile/touch devices have become more prevalent. The current design was really made to serve a traditional mouse driven experience with hovers playing a big role (in the links under the title bar for example). As it stands the site experience on an iPhone or other mobile devices smaller than a table leaves a lot to be desired.

Update: Seems like Google have saved the day once more. I've since activated the Beta feature for mobile templates and it makes browsing on the iPhone heaps better

In the interim it seems that the great team at Blogger have done quite a bit of work for me already. They have just recently introduced Dynamic Views which utilise the feeds off the blog to create a pretty snazzy HTML5/CSS3 view of the posts on the site. The only supported view on mobile phones is Mosaic which is a fluid layout that can support different device resolutions. Pretty smart idea and it works well on the phone. You can check out what the Rabbit in Mosaic here.

You'll probably notice that there are quite a few other views that Blogger are supporting. I love the Flipcard, which I would assume is the default when using a desktop browser. What's particularly funky about this is the ability to dynamically regroup posts by dates or labels. Pretty fun stuff and I'd encourage you to have a play here. In fact, I like it so much that I'm probably going to put a permanent link to the view on the page somewhere for easy access. Just haven't quite figured out where yet...

Not all the dynamic views seem to work all that well with the site for some reason so I guess it's either a bug that they are still working out or I'm doing something dodgy on my side. Likely to be the latter, given how smart the guys at Google are.

Digging through the other videos from Google they have a heap planned for Blogger in the near future. Fast forward to about 1:40 to check out the new features that will likely be coming soon. About time I say as the Blogger admin interface needs an update even more than the Rabbit does.