mattwie.be archives

EDIT: This was written on my old Blogger blog, prior to moving to my current WordPress powered blog on my own domain. I had hoped that the new version of Blogger would make me happy, but I ultimately found it far too limiting.

I just discovered today that Blogger is beta-testing a new version. For any who happen to care, I’m very happy about this.

Why you ask? Well, let’s see… adding tags to posts is enabled and you can sort a person’s blog by said labels. I have a bit of a cobbled-together approach of doing that right now using del.icio.us for my Tags section on the side, but it will be way nicer to have that functionality integrated.

They’re going to have a drag and drop template editor, which is cool for people who’d like to customize the look of their blog somewhat but don’t know how to monkey around with HTML and CSS code. I set up a quick test blog over there and was able to change a very familiar-looking default Blogger theme to a whole new color scheme without too much effort. I quickly added a nice little LibraryThing widget to show my recent books, and I was up and running.

They’ve also (finally) added the ability to subscribe to feeds for the entire blog’s comments and for individual posts’ comments. If they could just add category feeds to the mix, that’d be grand.

One things that’s surprised me about Blogger is that, even though they’re owned by Google, you have a separate login for the two. Well, that’ll change, as your Blogger account will merge into your Google account. One less thing to sign into is nice…

They’re also changing the entire back end of how blogs are published so that things should move MUCH more quickly. For more details on that and the rest of the new features, go see their what’s new page.