Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Anyone switched to the new Blogger Beta yet? Can't decide if I'll do it now or wait till it's settled in a bit.

Looks fancy though. It's going to have category archives, RSS feeds for comments and an end to the infamous "Publishing" spinner. Apparently all of my main gripes with blogger are about to become history. Which would be nice.

Update

Here's one I made earlier. You can't directly edit the HTML yet but it is coming. Can't find an RSS feed for all comments but it does have one for each post. It ll looks rather promising.

Update 2

Can't resist. It's like a new thing and stuff. Things might look a bit odd for a while while I get to grips with it. See you on the other side. I hope.

Update 3

Bah!
Could not switch you to the new Blogger

Thanks for your interest in the new Blogger in beta! For now, we are only switching a limited number of users to this new version. We can't switch your account at this time, but hope to be able to do so soon. Please check back through your dashboard for when you'll be able to try switching again.
And bah again.

The only reason I'd even heard about it was because there's a whole new Blogger login doodah which specifically asks if you want to switch. Not impressed.

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13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there a facility to generate a link-list to the most recent comments? It was that single omission, more than anything else, that finally drove me away from blogger and into the open arms of WordPress (which is the best move a blogger can make in my view)

Garry said...

Not sure yet. At the moment, I can't get it to produce the feed for all comments, just seperate feeds for individual posts. They do specifically say it can be done though so I suspect that's just a glitch. And there is an option to publish content from feeds in the sidebar so I suspect it'll be possible.

Been thinking about swapping to Wordpress for a while. This new blogger update'll probably allow me to continue to procrastinate on that.

Nosemonkey said...

Hmmm... Topic archives, eh? That was my main gripe - and my main reason for pondering the Wordpress move. They introduce that - and, preferably, a more flexible template editing system - and I may well stick around.

I'll still have to go through upwards of 2,000 posts assigning "labels", though...

Garry said...

The template system seems OK. You can mess about with the layout by dragging and clicking and without coming anywhere near HTML. It's not bad at all.

I'd switch today but once you've done it, there's no going back. Still, it's a shiny new thing. Not sure if I can resist...

Can't imagine I'll have the patience to go back over old posts to put them in categories though. That really is going above and beyond...

Davide Simonetti said...

I only just heard about it today. Like you I'm tempted but I'd like to know more. Basically I'm terrified of buggering up the whole blog. I like the idea of more easy template editing and a comment list. Hmm, I think I'll go and have another look.

Garry said...

Davide, I've decided I am going to go for it. The lure of the shiny new thing is strong indeed. Ditto on the worry that it'll bugger everything up but if they're encouraging people to switch, I'm going to assume they're reasonably confident that it won't all go horribly wrong. Hopefully.

That's my evening accounted for then.

Bill said...

I hadn't heard about this 'til I saw your post. It sounds like a good idea - no doubt there will be teething problems until it is rolled-out properly, which is why they call it a beta version, I suppose.

The facility to have category archives will be a big advance. I already switched about a year ago to having individual permalinks for each post - that helped a lot when I wanted to reference an earlier post; it took a while and quite a lot of HTML tweaking of my template to get it to work correctly. I also have a link-list for my 10 most recent posts - there is a guide on how to do it in 'How to' part of the help area.

I've often thought about moving the hosting of my blog onto a sub-area of my main website, but find it convenient to leave it the way it is for now. As for the Wordpress option, I've thought about that, too, but from what I see not everyone who has gone this route has managed to make the formatting look consistent across different browsers - I take a good deal of trouble to ensure that my blog works in the most popular browsers and that the formatting adjusts automatically for different page formats. I've been with Blogger since way before it became a small cog in the Google empire and a lot of the griping about problems with it seem to me to be down to the users themselves, although like all hosting systems (including the two other hosts with whom I host various other websites) they are subject to occasional down-time and I have only once been driven to move a website to another host for practical operational reasons.

MatGB said...

Shiny thing. Playing around with shiny thing. Am impressed. Muchly.

Which pretty much makes my decision for me, I'm using Blogger as a CMS on a different site already, and will be moving NLE to my own domain soon as well, now I can give up on thinking about Wordpress I think. If shiny thing isn't crap.

thx for heads up.

MatGB said...

Having played more, it's actually rather good, in many ways.

No sign of recent comments option, but I suspect the bloggerhack I'm using could still translate or will be updated, and that works ok.

Especially good is easy feed integration, that's a very impressive use given how much I use feeds for various things.

Davide Simonetti said...

Well I gave it a go but seeing as you can't switch over yet it seems a bit pointless. It is a bit better than the original Blogger, so I suppose I'll just have to wait until we can switch over. I was hoping for a better selection of templates.

Anonymous said...

I just made the switch to the new blogger account. I saw the option to switch in the dashboard and in a moment of bravery just sort of clicked on it. So The Nether-World has moved. I don't know how it will affect people trying to access it using the usual URL (the address is the same except that index.html is now added after).

I'll let you know more as I feel my way around.

Tim said...

Wheee! First on the (test) blogroll! I'm touched.

(And by that, I mean I may have the call the police if you don't watch your hands.)

Anonymous said...

Well, it's more or less up and running. I spent an extremely tedious few hours putting labels on my old posts but I think it was worth it because it is a very cool feature.

Now to start messing about with feeds.

Oh, one thing. I thought there was supposed to be a way to display recent comments. I can't find it so if anyone has any ideas...