bitbol

After what has probably been much more of a wait than it should have ever been, Blogger is now fessing up to an upgrade. Blogger has always been my blogging platform of choice, but we'll have to see if they can live up to it after the upgrade. Here are some of the features they have listed, and what I think about them:

• Feeds - Feeds and comment feeds are great, but I think they're getting a little too carried away by making a feed for every post's comments.
• Dynamics - This is a great addition, at least for those hosted through Blogger. I honestly can't believe that they have used static pages this whole time. Now, the pages will be created when you access them, not from files that require updating manually to change.
• Access control - According to this, they plan to allow you to limit the access to your blog to those that you choose. Based on email, you list who you want to see your blog, which is a great plus seeing how some people only use their blog to cater to an audience of a few people. You also have a better idea of who sees what you post, rather than the world in general.
• Labels - This is something that Blogger really needed years ago. They are just now allowing you to use labels to sort posts. I would love to be able to use labels, because it gives you way to read posts by topic, rather than sifting through the whole blog.
• Layouts - Here is something that I don't really care for. Although Blogger is catering to a larger audience by making it much easier to create the look and feel you want, I see it as making things too easy. When it is set up through a control panel to allow to change colors, you make it easy enough for what I would expect to be preteens and teens who think that using every color ever created is cool. Much of the reason that I never look at blogs hosted on Xanga is because of the fact that you give options to easily create the most disgustingly colored page in history. While this won't be the case for all, I do see it happening.
• Google accounts - Perhaps one of the greater things of the upgrade is the fact that Blogger is finally being integrated into Google. This means just that many less logins and passwords to remember, and allowing you to connect all of your stuff better (like Gmail).

I can see there might be a bumpy transition, and some getting used to, but I hope that this is a change for the better. With any luck, all the greatness of the old Blogger will still be there, but with the addition of all the new features.

Labels: Blogger