Wednesday, December 23, 2020

A Brief History of Blogger Time

Blogger Themes and Templates Throughout the Ages

Cave painting of animals
Early Blogger themes lacked a sidebar and other features we take for granted today.
The customizable responsive themes that Google introduced in 2017 (Notable, Emperio, Contempo, Soho) are the latest family of Blogger offerings since Blogger's inception (pre-Google) in 1999.

The three most recent "generations" of themes, Designer (2010), Dynamic (2011), and Responsive (2017), are each still widely in use.

Let's call them the "Modern" themes. (Google sometimes refers to them as "second generation layout" themes.)

Themes used to be called templates, and the terms are interchangeable.

Older themes are still in use, but are not as common.

The Modern Age

Designer (2010). These templates, Simple, Watermark, Awesome, Picture Window, and Travel, were introduced in conjunction with the Theme Customizer (then called Template Designer).

Customizer permitted thousands of variations and customizations without once editing the theme code directly.

These templates were a huge step up for Blogger, and are still used widely today. Though not responsive, they are good general-purpose themes, customizable and flexible. 

The addition of corresponding mobile themes in 2011 extended the usefulness of the Designer themes.

Dynamic (2011). These 7 templates are technically one template with 7 views (Classic, Flipcard, Magazine, Mosaic, Sidebar, Timeslide).

Blogger promoted them as alternatives rather than successors to the Designer templates released the year before. They are quite striking!

Some of these views are substantially responsive, paving the way for the Responsive themes in 2017.

One trick I like is how, without actually switching, you can peek at any blog as if it were on this theme by adding "/view/flipcard" (or other) to the root url of the blog. 

You can link to these views if you like! For instance here is this blog in Mosaic.

Drawbacks: The dynamic themes are not very customizable. Also, because these themes rely on a published blog feed, they are not available to private blogs.

Mobile (2011). The Designer templates are not responsive and were unreadable on people's phones. Google wrote a mobile-specific template in 2011.  It is limited in scope, but an improvement.

This is the mobile option available on the Theme page for non-responsive themes. (Responsive themes do not need one.)

Responsive (2017). These elegant themes shift and flow based on the size and shape of the browser window. There is no separate "mobile" theme, just a single theme for every view, which adapts to the viewer.

These responsive themes, however, are also specialized. They can be brittle and sometimes difficult to customize. 

In this respect, they are kind of a midpoint between the Designer and Dynamic themes.

With mobile bloggers in mind, Google added the simpler (but still responsive) Essential theme to this family in 2020.

Ancient Greek inscription on a moss-covered stone
Older templates have proved durable, if not fully functional.

Ancient Blogger

From its inception in 1999 until the 2010 introduction of Designer templates (above), Blogger went through a few big technological changes, several in conjunction with new template architecture.

I did not start blogging until 2008, so I missed some of these.

Original (1999) The original Blogger was basically just a collection of posts: the most recent post became the home page, and there were few pathways to older material.

That changed in 2004, the year after Google bought Blogger.

Classic (2004). These themes showed multiple posts on the home page and provided an archive gadget. This was kind of a flowering period for Blogger, with many hundreds of graphically sophisticated templates, some commissioned by Google and some by third parties.

I find many of these more attractive than the Designer defaults, but they are not up to snuff technologically with their more-modern counterparts.

A green themed blog
A once-popular Classic Blogger theme, "Thisaway Green."

I'll add that with a little elbow grease it is possible to customize the Designer themes to resemble the old Classic templates.


I did exactly that with my apple blog, which superficially looks like the Classic template called Thisaway Green. (But under the hood, it is built on the ca. 2017 Notable. From 2013–2924, it was built on Picture Window, and it really looked a good deal like Thisaway Green.)

Note: My grasp of Blogger pre-2008 is fuzzy. I would welcome any corrections, which I will incorporate into this report.

Update: In light of this, here are my thoughts about which theme might be best for you.

Above: public domain photo of a Neolithic rock painting from the Lascaux caves in southwest France. The paintings there are 15,000–17,000 years old. The photo of the Greek inscription is courtesy of Maurice Flesier via Creative Commons license.

8 comments:

  1. Well. I like my blog postst - and yours - to keep still while I try and read them. No dynamíc templates for me thank you very much.
    Can you do it the other way around as well? ... I mean can you make the blogs non-dynamic by adding a piece of code in the end of the url? I would happily do so.

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    1. Very funny, @Charlotte! But for anyone who might not get the joke, the themes do not jiggle about.

      You can even preview them without changing your theme if you like.

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    2. Oh! The language barrier at work again. I was actually not being funny. I'm a bit vision impared, and things that jumps, enlarges, turns etc on mouseover make it almost impossible for me to read a blog, or even look at it - the same as white letters ion black. I have stopped following great many good blogs for those reasons. (and our local news service too)
      And my question was serious as well. I already read the post you linked to, and dreamt of doing the opposite: If I try to read a blog with for instance those turning tiles, can I add a code to the url to make them keep still while I read them, or do this only work for my own blog?

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    3. Charlotte, what you see when you preview a blog as described is exactly what everyone would see if you adopted one of those themes.

      The dynamic themes (named after a characteristic related to the software, not the display) rely on scripts that process the blog feed rather than editable code. So, they resist most customization.

      Don't choose them if you don't like them, in other words.

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    4. 1.st half yes. Understood.
      It's the second half ... ohters' blogs which buggers me. Because I can't choose other peoples' themes for them (bit joking here). I feel sorry for myself being cut off from a lot of interesting blogs. And hoped that I could type in ...blogname/something_static/ to "preview" their blogs without moving parts. I understand from your answer about dynamic scripts that this must remain a dream.

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    5. Well, you can choose which of the seven dynamic themes you view, and some of the might be better than others. See for instance "/views/classic."

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  2. Hi! Your template is so beautiful.
    Can u give me you're blogger theme for free? ^^

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    Replies
    1. @Goku, this is just the basic Picture WIndow theme, available free from Google on the Theme page.

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