It helps to have a little operation named “Google” behind you. The free blogs from Blogger.com have trashed those big fat ad banners and replaced it with a svelte navigation bar.
As reported by the designer Douglas Bowman of stopdesign, there are 4 flavors to choose from, and the bar adds a blog search function (way overdue), a BlogThis button that helps other bloggers blog your blog (get it?), and a button that jumps to another random blog.
Okay, it is not earth shattering, but added to the new mature templates, it makes Blogger blogs look and act less like cheesy free sites.
Note the Blogger bloggers- you need to use the Template tools to select which navbar to apply, and then republish your blog. You may also need to reload in your browser to clear the cached version. See the help pages for details, another thing they are doing well by providing a comprehensive authoring guide.
I hope to be working the next few weeks on a Blogger.com version of our MovableTyoe BlogShop that will reside at:
http://blogshop.blogspot.com/
Not much to be seen there yet. I gotta learn it as I build it.
It seems that someone has found a way to remove it already 😉
http://removethebar.blogspot.com
I am afraid I do not see the point in the hacks– the navbar is pretty unobtrusive, it *adds* functionality (search), and it replaces those annoying pop up banners.
The “hacks” to remove it often deconstruct the web page underlying structure– putting the BIDY tag inside a NOSCRIPT tag, c’mom you might as well go back to the title bar anmations from the mid 1990s. For those not around, people found that a long string of TITLE tags at the top would create an effect of animated text across the titlebar when the page loaded. Cheap web tricks. Go BLINK.
You can never please everyone.
Well, although you refer to it as being ‘un-obtrusive’, it broke so many peoples designs. The kind of people whose designs weren’t created by them. And they have neither the will power nor the know how to edit the designs to create a fix. Hence, hacks are required. Although, I do like the idea of the “blogthis!” and “next blog” – the discoveries of experience that I have found are amazing ( as were the let downs ). But I just made javascript bookmarkelts for those. Rather than having them steal attention from what I want in my viewport.
I’ve just edited Fire Fox to add
#b-navbar
{
display:none !important
}
to my user styles section, becuase I don’t feel it’s necessary.