New toys. Yay!

Blogger informs us that there are now five new ways to view its blogs, should the blogmaster choose to enable them.  These dynamic views are available by appending /view to the URL of the blog, for example http://fieldnotesontheweb.blogspot.com/view.

• The default view is sidebar, which puts the headlines along the left and the currently selected post on the rest of the page.   Click on a headline in the sidebar to bring up a different post.
• Timeslide lays out a selection of recent and not-so-recent posts in a somewhat hard-to-describe way that probably starts to make sense once you use it.  Click on a post and this layout slides aside to let you read that post and go to the next one, the previous one, or back to the main display.
• Mosaic is aimed more at blogs with images, which this one isn't.  The posts are laid out in a sort of Mondrian without the colors with no indication of date.  Click through on whatever looks good.
• Snapshot shows only images, so it's not much good here.
• Flipcard lays out squares representing posts in various ways.  The Date arrangement, for example, will show you graphically the demise of the 10-posts-a-month quota.  The "flip" effect probably makes more sense with images involved.

As a side effect, I've enabled "full" syndication (I had had it set to "short"), so you may notice a difference if you're subscribing.  Also, all of the dynamic views lose the styling of the original blog.  Personally, I like the original style -- I picked it out and tweaked it, after all, and tried to make it accessible to color-blind readers -- but the prose should sparkle just as much or little either way.

[Playing around with this, I note that if you click through on a link to a Field Note, you get the original blog in all its stylish glory.  The dynamic views are just dynamic views of the feed, not the blog itself, which is why I had to turn on full feed syndication to enable them.]