New Way To View Blog Posts

How do you read your favorite blogs? I have three ways – Google Reader, IGoogle home page, and for my Can’t-Miss-A-Post blogs, I subscribe by email.

Lemme ask you this – how many blogs do you read on an average day? Not as many as you’d like to, right? Me, neither.

If I read them regularly via gmail, I can read their post and see pics right in my email. Saves me oodles of time – time to read more blogs!  But Google Reader & IGoogle just show the title of the last post, right?

Today I found a very cool Blogger tool. Okay, I didn’t ‘find’ it – Lorie @ Be Different Act Normal posted about it. But I did click over to read what Google had to say about the new Blogger Views.

Here’s the deal – there are now 5 different views for Blogger blogs, besides the regular blog layout. So, what’s the big deal? Now you can scan a ton of posts (with pics) at once!

Flipcard loaded the last 100 posts. Mosaic appears cool, but I think it’s harder to find posts – although this view shows a little text, not just thumbnails. Sidebar is nice, but pretty similar to Google Reader. I like Timeslide because it’s kind of a magazine format.

The 5th view, Snapshot, got hinky with my blog posts. It shows a bunch of thumbnails for the same post if I’ve linked up to a party, which I do frequently.

Speaking of hinky, I noticed a problem with my blog – the photos that are displayed are more often than not a thumbnail of a blog party button, not the ‘lead’ photo of my post. That bums me out a bit.

While I will use this feature to visit other Blogger blogs, and hope you try it out for Mural Maker & More, I wish my own photos showed up instead of blog buttons.

You can look at any Blogger blog using one of these five templates. All you need to do is enter “/view” after the blog’s URL. That is, unless the author has it disabled.

Try it out on a few blogs and let me know what you think. See if it you don’t agree that it allows you to see a lot more content in a lot less time.