Bloggeratto

This little mod comes from Russia (with love, i hope) and it has been waiting for over a year in a comment that was posted in the Peek-A-Boo Blogger Navbar post.

Unfortunately Russian is one of the languages i truly don’t know anything about and it just puzzles me. So there is a bit of a language barrier there. But the guy who developed this is called Артем Ивлев and looks like he is a Lotus Expert (Domino, Connections, Quickr, etc) and he has this blog with the name Homo Ludens that i guess refers to the “Play Theory” of the dynamic of Society and Culture and how that dynamic create art that reflects on the society that at the same time creates culture around the art as time passes and the circle goes over and over.

So this nice Mod (or Hack to a degree) comes with a instant Blogger page element install button. So thanks to that i can now offer it to you all since then the language barrier is not much of a problem but merely a bump.

This comes as a Blogger Navbar Mod that makes it retractable for 5 seconds.

So you can have the Blogger Navbar without having to remove it and without having to show it. It only will be shown if the visitor of your blog wants to access it. To do that he only needs to click a little rectangle in the top left corner of your blog that shows as this:

Once it is clicked, the navbar shows.

5 seconds pass and it hides.

The hiding happens in a nice one second motion.

An Actual Ideal Way To Hide The Blogger Navbar.

When i remember back on my idea of the Peek-A-Boo Blogger Navbar thing. The truth is that it was not the first take. My first take was exactly a Retractable Blogger Navbar just like this. It was never done because it required more of anyone wanting to use it since they had to install it themselves. So it didn’t had the mass appeal of my other idea. That i must say that it is heyday i would not be surprised if it was used by at least a 1000 blogs. 

That is quite a high number because it still needed to be installed but since the installation was only two lines of css code, it was adopted very well.  Another reason why it was chosen over is this was because it didn’t needed JS so there were not going to be issues with it.

This in the other hand don’t has that problem because the code needed for it (JS) auto-installs for the user thanks to the fact that it uses the One Click Install Button concept brought by the Blogger Page Elements and Blogger Gadgets.  This also reminds me to think that every single new Mod and Hack to Blogger should be archived this way. As a Auto-Installable Blogger Page Element or Gadget.

So i take my hat off because while the whole thing is simple, it is very well executed.

How To Install

Well, you only need to visit Артем Ивлев blog post and look out for this button:

You click it and it will ask you to log into your Google Account and then will take you to this Settings page:

Since the Page Element calls for a function that positions the little rectangle in the Top left corner of your Blog to show the Blogger Navbar. The little space it uses in your sidebar don’t shows a thing. For that reason i recommend you to leave the title field blank or just put a “.” or a “-“ simple to identify the element in your layout. You can then just drag it down to the bottom of your sidebar and leave it there.

Some Notes

While the Retractable Blogger Navbar mod is very well done. One of the rough things about it is that you cannot customize the text in the rectangle that serves as the “show navbar” button. So it will show as it is in Russian. Another thing is that it would be great if it not only the text could be customized but you could add a little favicon sized element you could link to that would really make it stand out, or that it already came with a arrow pointing down as a way to better indicate the action of what it does.

But at least i can tell you that it works very well and in my test of it cross browser. It worked perfectly in every current browser and that when it came to IE6 or IE7 the times it didn’t worked it just didn’t do nothing. So it will not get in the way of your blog if someone visits with a old browser. They simply don’t see the feature and that is that.

So a good feature to have if you are willing to look away from the peeve it has of not being customizable.

Linkage

Retractable Blogger Navbar

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