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Blogger Beta - first impressions
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
After a couple of weeks of not blogging due to other commitments, I logged into my Blogger Dashboard to see an invitation to upgrade to Blogger Beta.
Firstly, I had to agree to upgrade, with dire warnings that I couldn't go back to the old Blogger. With the 'nothing ventured nothing gained' attitude, I started the process. Firstly, I had to confirm my Blogger login details followed by my Google account details (you can setup a Google account here if you don't already have one). The ubiquitous agreement to the latest terms and conditions followed then the screen told me that my blog was being converted and that I'd receive an e-mail when it was completed.
Simple and straightforward so far...I logged back into my Blogger account to see a new dashboard - this showed a list of my blogs, complete with last post date for each (same as the old) but also the total number of posts, any comments that need moderating * and a list of common tasks.
A quick flick through all the functions showed not much change, but I suspect that's because all my blogs are published on my own server, rather than on Blogger itself.
The best feature so far for me is labels - you can add labels to each post, then visitors to your blog can click on the label to see all other posts labelled in a similar way.
My biggest gripe so far is that the posting word verification has reared it's ugly head. This means that to make any post, you have to complete the verification box. Normally, this is because you publish on Blogger and they think your blog might be spam. It may be that they are checking all blogs for quality purposes but after 100 posts on my own server, I'm slightly irritated and bemused. To remove this, you need to create a new post, scroll down the word verification section and click on the orange question mark. This takes you to a form to submit to Blogger for them to verify your site isn't spam.
* One other surprise was the comments needing moderating - after I removed the ability to comment on my blog, I never saw any comments again (good), but that meant that some comments were left in no man's land - neither visible or able to be moderated. Logging in, I did see that there are comments that needed approving or rejecting.
Overall though, not much seems to have changed. Perhaps if I create a new blog, I'll see more of the new features.
Labels: blogging
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