Switching to Blogger Beta

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This is not going to be interesting for people who don’t use Blogger.

After some trepidation, I switched over to Blogger Beta yesterday, and this is the Dummy Blogger Who Has Never Used Any Other Host But Blogger viewpoint of the changes they’ve made (there are lots of other people out there talking about completely incomprehensible things, and using the word “dynamic” a lot, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.). There were two things I was worried about, but I saw that they now allowed HTML editing of their new layouts system, and that switching over to Beta didn’t prevent people commenting on your blog if they hadn’t switched over yet, so I took a deep breath and made the change.

The Good Things:-

• You can keep your old template - it’s called Classic mode, while the new system is Layouts mode. You can edit your template in exactly the same way.
• If you want to try out the new Layout mode, you can easily switch over - if you change your mind, which I did, you just revert to Classic mode, and Blogger pulls up the version of your template it saved when you switched over, so that nothing has changed.
• The “click and pull” mode of changing your template around is very easy to use - it’s a simple matter to change colours and fonts around, and to add things in your sidebar like your Blogroll code.
• While I’ve stayed in Classic mode in this blog, I’ve changed my other blogs over to Layouts. The ability to put posts into categories (”label” them) was the main reason I wanted to switch into Beta, and it works very well. When you make a post, there’s a little box down the bottom where you type in your labels. The labels show up at the bottom of each post, and clicking on one pulls up all the other posts in that label (you can also have your labels show up in the sidebar of your Layout).
• The “edit posts” area has had a redesign, and now shows you how many comments you’ve got on each post.
• The Dashboard area is also different, and much improved - you can click directly into the different editing areas for each blog.
• If you get email notification for comments, Gmail stores all the comments on one post in a single conversation, and has the title of the post in the subject of the email - so easy to respond to everything.
• Posts, and template changes, publish instantly - no more little “publishing” twirly.
• The spellchecking is now just like Gmail - a vast improvement.

The Not So Good Things:-

• The Layouts are just like the old templates - boring, boring, boring. There’s only so much you can do changing the colours around. I really like having a sidebar column on each side, and none of the Layouts provide for that. I arrogantly thought I might be able to fiddle around and change it, but uh, no. The language the Layouts use is completely different to what they used for the templates - I was completely lost. So now I’m waiting until someone designs some decent things using the new Layouts system.
• Unless you’ve changed over into Layouts, you can’t use labels. Waaaah. So until I find a design I like for this blog, I won’t have labels. Very sad.
• It’s a little annoying having your Gmail account connected to your blogging account. I chose not to use my main email address as my blogging username, and it means I can’t be logged into my main email account and logged into Blogger Beta at the same time, because they’re two different accounts. Which is frustrating, but I’ll get over it.
• That’s all I can actually think of for the moment - I think there are more negatives when you’ve made more changes to your template than I have here, and are using other labelling systems, or other little things within the template that won’t translate over to the new system.

More positives than negatives, at this stage, and I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with the Layouts and labels and things on the other blogs. It’ll be even better when people start designing things to fit in with the new system - but for now I’ll just enjoy the smoother interface and fiddling with the existing layouts on the other blogs.

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