December 30, 2006

Neo and Outlook - an analogy!

I came to know that some people wonder why Neo supports only one post in the main page. I can understand that they have seen so many blogs with many posts in the main page and so they find it wierd.

Here's an analogy for the way Neo works. The idea behind Neo is that your blog is viewable at the speed of a desktop application. Compare it with Microsoft Outlook 2003 where you have 3 columns: Folders, List of emails, one particular email. With Neo, we have the blog equivalent: Labels, List of posts, one post.
  • Outlook doesn't show multiple emails to start with but instead the list of email subjects so that one can choose which emails to read. This avoids scrolling down too much which is a pain if you have a mouse without scroll wheel. Neo uses a similar approach for blog posts by showing list of post titles and one post. Click, click, click on post titles and you're done reading all posts! You may have to scroll down only for longer posts.
  • Outlook doesn't restart when you click to view a particular email - that would be really wierd ;-). Similarly, Neo doesn't reload the page for every post.
  • Outlook shows the recent emails first in any folder. Neo shows recently updated posts first for any label. It also shows the newer comments before older ones.
So, there you go. Think out of the box and you will appreciate the difference.

P.S. I didn't realize that my design for Neo matches with Outlook until today morning :) To see what else can be done using AJAX/JSON, check out the new hacker in the block, Deepak's AJAX Labels. Also, keep an eye on the "young gun" Aditya as he might come out with something amazing anytime ;)

11 comments:

yogi said...

Happy new year to you! You might want to check this :
http://yogesh-mujumdar.blogspot.com/2006/12/quote-day-widget-for-blogger.html

Do comment on it :)

Jessi said...

quick question off topic...i know there are instructions on adding a header img, using the elements. do you have a link?

thanks!

Unknown said...

Jessi,

With google search, I found this post. see if it is helpful for you.
http://testing-blogger-beta.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-graphic-to-your-blog-header.html

brillini said...

Is it possible to remove the words, "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" from appearing on my blog? If so, how?

Anonymous said...

I am having some problem in my blogging. sidebar isn't working properly in the main page.It didn't happen before.

dj said...

Hi there Ramani,

I am a complete believer in credit where credit is due. So thank you so much for the help provided here on Hackosphere and the comment you left me on my own blog.

Sincerely

J

Frank Black said...

Ramani:

I'm sorry for posting a question that is unrelated to this post, but I didn't know how else to ask a question. If there is a preferred method, please let me know what it is and I will follow it.

I've been experimenting with many things on my template and they all seem to work well. One minor annoyance is related to the alignment of text with an icon/image.

I've included the "AddThis" feature to allow readers to add a post to one of many popular social bookmarking sites with only one link. It is very convenient. Also, I altered the display icon to suit my tastes.

Rather than add the link's code to the end of my posts (and having to do it each time), I've added it to my template so it appears on the "Posted by" line right after the time and right before the number of comments.

All that is working, but the icon seems to "float" just a little above the text. There are not blank pixels in the image, so it has nothing to do with that. I've tried every formatting command that I know and it still hovers above the text. Is there a way to make the bottom of the image align with the bottom of the text? I know I am not following the prescribed method for using "AddThis" (which prefers that the link be placed at the end of the post's text rather than in the template), but this is how I prefer it.

You can see it by going to my blog: http://pen-sieve-one.blogspot.com.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

And, I've read your blog with great interest and applied many of your suggestions to my configuration with great success. Thank you very much for your generous and skilled suggestions.

Frank Black said...

Ramani:

As a follow-up, is there a way that I can center my post's title by editing the template? I know I can center the title by adding "center", but I don't want to use that method since it actually alters my titles to include that statement.

Again, thank you for your help.

Unknown said...

Frank,

I am just giving an idea which may or may not work. you can define this CSS and see if it works.

.post-footer img {
align:bottom;
}

and for centering post title, try

.post-title {
text-align:center;
}

I.M. Wright said...

Hey I really like your hacks; they're making the transition to blogger really fun. I have a question for you. Is it possible to select a specific post (in my case I would like it to be a welcome message) to always be the only post on the home screen (i.e. myname.blogspot.com)? I would like to have people navigate from this home screen to specific labels or post titles on the sidebar.

Unknown said...

Wright, you can try the sticky post hack explained in
this post.