I might be in love with Blogger Beta

I have been playing around with the beta of the new blogger. It is a major improvment over the blogger we have all come to love (except for the routine downtimes of course and the moments of zen reflection while waiting for your blog to republish).

The pluses that I know all of you have been waiting for.

• No more republishing. In the old days when you changed something or put up a new post blogger would create a whole new set of static html pages that came up when somebody visited your site. And those of you with big blogs realize just how annoying that can be. The new blogger beta creates a new web page everytime a viewer goes to the site (they do this based on information in their database). No more republishing, thank you blogger.


• Much less html dependancy. Have you ever wanted to move one sidebar item above or below another one, but waited because you didn't want to go into the template and find the section and then move it to where you think it should go. Sometimes you would do it anyway and oops, you accidently pasted it into the wrong area. The new feature fixes this, it makes each one of these sidebar items a seperate box in a visual representation of your layout. You just grab it and drag it to where you want it and hit save. Done, remember no more republishing.
  


• RSS Feeds. Blogger added support for the newest standard of Atom and also added RSS support. The biggie here though is that they have added RSS feeds for comments. Sweet. Plus you have two options a feed for the comments to a particular post or the feed to all the comments. This leads to some nice features. Because you can get a comment feed, you can set up a chunk on your sidebar that list the last few comments left.
  


• Support for Post labels. What this lets you do is catagorize your posts and give them labels. Readers can then click on a post label and will get all your other previous posts with that label. This can be a great way of creating catogories for posts that are easy for readers to find and filter.


• New options for the blog archive list. You can now configure this list without going into the html and css. Additionally, you have several new options. One you can have the traditional flat view that is used mostly now. Two is the new hierarchy view tree. This will summarize the blogposts into time periods, so you can click on 2006 to get to this years post and then on the little arrow next a month to get the posts for that month and then you can have them in thier sorted by tittle or date. The third option is the one you will find on Beta Real. A drop down list that of course can be by month, week or day. Another nice feature is a little check box that lets you chose to have newest first or oldest first. No html or css knowledge required.


• One more for those of you scared to death of the html and css. You can go change your blog colors and fonts in a nice visual window that lets you pick colors much as you would in an office program or ms paint. Coupled with a real time preview it is really easy to see if it would look good to change the font or your blog title, no republishing required. One more sweet tweak is as you set up your custome colors blogger collects them into a little panel of your blog colors making it easier to keep up a stylistic theme.


• Updated dashboard gives some nice links for easier managment of your blog.
  
  

Okay there are a few things that some people may see as downers.

• The new beta is by invitation only to existing bloggers for right now. Those lucky ones selected should see a blue box informing them if the new beta is available to them. Being a beta I believe that they don't want to potentially overload their servers with a mass migration, especially considering I don't think they know for sure how much extra server load it might require to dynamically generate the html pages versus creating the static ones when you repost. Luckily though if you want to set up a new blog in the beta you can do it very easily at the beta blogger site. This leads us to our next point.


• The new blogger usernames and passwords are going to be googles user names and passwords. So if you want a new beta blogger blog you are going to need a google account to do it. Personally as a gmail user I love this, one less set of log in creds to keep up with and seeing as it has googles log in the security of your log in will probably be a little higher than the old blogger log in.


• You still have the next blog bar, and it may be harder to remove. I know somepeople think it is ugly and they don't like the blogger branding on their site. Me I like the thing, I think it isn't to unatractive plus it brings me a little new traffic via the next blog button. Plus blogger is giving you a free blog if you want it, don't complain when they have a little tiny bit of branding going on.

There is a lot of other cool information available at Google Operating Systems blog and at the Beta Blogger website.