Fix: Blogger Dynamic Views Fails to Load Properly

Here is how to fix your Blogger dynamic views theme bug that makes menu and custom CSS disappear causing websites and blogs look ugly.

Update on 2017-09-19: Google has included our fix to the Dynamic Views theme so it is no longer necessary to manually patch it. However, if you want search engines to be able to index your website, we suggest not using Dynamic Views, as it does not offer any basic elements that are necessary for successfully indexing websites.

We switched to Blogger Contempo theme and started a new project to fix its SEO issues. The new, fixed theme is applied to our travel blog. We will be releasing all the new fixes, programs and instructions on this discussion forum.

The original fix

June 9, 2013 (updated on March 25, 2015)

We fixed the problem with the dynamic views Blogger failed to fix for over six months. In about every tenth page load, custom CSS fails to load properly, there is no menu, and the dock is empty. This makes websites look ugly and leaves users stranded without navigation. When the bug happens, user has to reload the page with [ctrl]-R or [shift]-[ctrl]-R once or twice before the website gets back to normal.

According to Blogger, over 2 million people use dynamic views making this a serious problem. There were no other workarounds available except reverting back to the non-dynamic, traditional template, or changing the blogging platform. For us, changing was not an option after fixing 180+ blog posts and thousands of lines of javascript code in order to make them work with the new dynamic views template. However, changing the blogging platform might be the only viable option in future, if there will be more critical bugs that Google is not willing to fix.

Great news: we fixed the problem. It has been applied to this blog a few days ago, and according to the feedback, everything functions properly now. The instructions for the fix are below.

Thank you, Mishka, for explaining in the Google Products forum that Blogger is not going to fix the issue and does not even perceive it as a bug, but merely as an unwanted feature. After that, we started to read the javascript, which Blogger uses to render the dynamic views templates. There is a timeout function that will interrupt loading, if loading takes too long, and Blogger will render the view anyway. Because of that, when loading takes a bit longer, some parts of the GUI are not yet loaded when the rendering happens causing the bug. To fix this, we changed the timeout function to onload meaning that the page will be rendered only after it has been loaded. The earlier fix of increasing the timeout value was trivial and failed sometimes when loading the page took too long, especially when browsing with mobile devices. Special thanks to O. Marcel Aulenbacher for his help in perfecting the fix. We have been running it now over a year now and it appears to work perfectly.

To access and edit Blogger template, go to Dashboard, select Template from the pulldown menu, and Edit HTML. Then scroll down until you see the following lines at the bottom of the template:

    <script language='javascript' type='text/javascript'>
      setTimeout(function() {
        blogger.ui().configure().view();
      }, 0);
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Change the setTimeout function to window.onload so that the template looks like this:

    <script language='javascript' type='text/javascript'>
      window.onload = function() {
        blogger.ui().configure().view();
      };
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Click Save template. After that, go to your website and make sure everything works. If you get your dynamic views fixed, please share this page to others. There are still over 2 million bloggers using the dynamic views version that does not work properly. In case something goes wrong, leave us a comment telling what happened, so we can figure out together how to fix that. Thank you.

A similar incident happened in 2009. Is Google planning to shut down Blogger? Does this imply that the dynamic views template will soon be discontinued? Why Google fails to react to the complaints of angry bloggers? In any case, this is exactly the same kind of customer service that made us ditch Google Books permanently in 2007.