Google Upgrades Blogger

thetan writes "Google has announced the first major upgrade to Blogger since taking over the creaking old platform. Still in beta, the new service offers a tie-in to your Google Account, dynamic pages, separate comment feeds, new layouts, an apparent merger with Google's Page Creator for WYSIWYG editing, integration of feeds, public/private access control and — of interest to bloghackers — tag-based labels for categories. Take the tour."

I'll Stick to nano

Sorry, WYSIWYG is not for me. I hate pretty things. I'll stick with good ol' nano as my website creating tool.

Even better than MySpace

Nano? I'll stick with notepad.

I am glad that Google has made this upgrade. Blogger has always had a pretty clean layout that doesn't get in the way of the content (are you listening MySpace?) and makes sites pretty easy to read. Ever since they announced Google Pages I wondered when they were going to integrate it into Blogger. I played with Pages and found that while it lacks power and advanced features, it just plain works. That is the most important thing. After all, most people above a certain coding ability will probably have their own sites and will not be using Blogger in the first place.

You know that Google has come up with something great when they announce that it has made it out of testing and into Beta stage.

Re:Even better than MySpace

Right. I wish I could have a web service that everyone fawned over, yet when it went down those same people would immediately understand with "It's okay, it's beta."

Call me back when it's been released. I've used Blogger for years and frankly I don't like being jerked around with features I didn't ask for at the cost of reliability. Remember when only beta testers got to use beta software, leaving the rest of us with a presumably stable release?

Re:I'll Stick to nano

nano?

Give me a break, emacs has supported whatever it is this article is about for too long now.

When to use Tags (versus Categories)

I think the addition of labels is the most significant upgrade to Blogger. Now, if only I could tag my Slashdot Journal [imediaconnection.com] entries.

I do have a question. Many blogs support both Categories and Tags. I understand Google's desire to simplify things, so I think if I could have only one or the other, I'd choose tags. Now that Moveable Type 3.3 has come out and natively supports both tags and categories, I'm at a loss as to when to use which. Do I stick w/ my Categories and leave tagging for a tag cloud and for hooks for Technorati?

Re:When to use Tags (versus Categories)

Tags are better to facilitate searching, categories are better to steer your regular readers. Chris Pirillo uses extensive tags in his blog [pirillo.com] while Poh Huai Bin uses categories in his [sixthseal.com].

As regular readers of both I MUCH prefer categories. If I'm interested in what one of my blog heros has to say on a broad topic I have a lot more success and fun browsing through everything in a category than by trying to figure out some arbitrary keyword.

You do what you feel suits your blog content and organization best, but if it were me I'd set up categories. I might be old fashioned, though.

Re:When to use Tags (versus Categories)

As regular readers of both I MUCH prefer categories. If I'm interested in what one of my blog heros has to say on a broad topic I have a lot more success and fun browsing through everything in a category than by trying to figure out some arbitrary keyword.

Categories also allow your users to read 'virtual blogs'. On several blogs that I read regularly, I don't have the main page bookmarked - but rather one or more category pages. This allows me to read entries on say, geocaching, while avoiding entries on cats.

Bloghackers?

"Bloghackers"
That is just so Web 2.0, isn't it?

"tie-in to your google account"

Not just a "tie-in", but a forced migration, similar to flickr moving to using yahoo accounts:

Blogger moves to Google Accounts, so your account will be more secure and you don't have to remember extra credentials.

Am I the only one really disliking this? I don't want to tie all the pieces of information about me together. I want to keep them separate, running on different domains, having nothing to do with each other! It's bad enough that Google can tie my searches to my email, but when it's able to tie it together with my cat pictures and what I had for dinner last night (okay, so not really), that's really several bridges too far.

Re:"tie-in to your google account"

Not fair! I want to be able to keep all my data private and my accounts separate, but also get all the benefits of letting Google see all my data and keeping my accounts in one place. We can send a man to the moon but we can't do this?!

Still in beta

Still in beta

What does Google actually have (other than search) that isn't in beta? There comes a point when you just have to release something (as much as you can do in web apps). How long has Google Groups been in 'beta' now?

Does it work with Konqueror/Safari yet?

See subject

OpenID?

But does it support OpenID? Can I maintain a cross blogsite friends list? Honest question actually - why don't LJ, Blogger et al. allow you to maintain a friends lists across sites, along with an integrated feed of their blogs? I could write a blog app for my site that generated a feed from my friends across sites, but its a bit useless unless you can run it both ways. I could use a blog client that crossposted to several sites - but that's a messy unintegrated solution that just clutters up the net with dupes.. Obviously sites aren't keen on effectively pimping out their competitors, but the arguments here are the same as those for open document formats and cross compatibility in software, unless I'm missing a trick (or a whole magic show)?

Pretty good. I like it, anyway.

No raw HTML/CSS template editing yet, but apparently that's coming soon. The labels thing is a pretty good idea. I made a blog [blogspot.com]. It's awesome.

lable

How about we lable this about darn time. I like blogger... I use blogger... It's been one of the least trashy blog services by trashy I mean I don't want to post something remotely thoughtful at a .livejournal account. Blogspot is much nicer sounding.

Google vs. Microsoft

This is probably to go head to head with Windows Live Writer [live.com]

Yes, but did they fix sftp yet?

Blogger has had a long standing problem with ssh/sftp on non-standard ports. It didn't work, then they fixed it, then they broke it, then they fixed it, then they documented that it's not supported.

This leads me to believe that they aren't using a standard client, but rather wrote their own, with all that implies.

I had hoped that when Google acquired them, all that would be quickly resolved, but apparently not.

A serious question about Blogger and spam

Blogger seems to be the source of a lot of the spam blogs that account for the stats like a new blog every half second on technorati. Does Google have any incentive to change this fact, since the bandwidth costs are minimal, it drives up their blogger stats and it brings more people into the Google ecosystem?

I want an updatel filters comments out

...that say "This is an interesting blog. By the way, you can get really cheap pool chemicals at spammer.gotohell.com."

Now if only thier feeds weren't crippled

I read a few people's blogger/blogspot blogs (including John Kricfalusi [blogspot.com] of Ren & Stimpy fame, The Online Photographer [blogspot.com] and others), and there's something that really bugs me about their feeds: the images don't show up. In an effort to save bandwidth, Blogger has prevented all external linking, including from Bloglines. For a blog about photography or animation, this makes the feeds next to useless. The thing that gets me is that this is actually costing them more bandwidth, since I'm downloading the feed and then going to the page to see the images anyway. Blogger: if you're going to allow full-text feeds, allow images too. Picasa web galleries allow hot-linking, Google video allows embedding... but blogger won't allow images in feeds?

A gaping hole in functionality...

I've still not seen any blogging platform that overcomes my number one objection to using them: I haven't a damn thing to say.

Give me one that generates Markov-chain paragraphs based on Google Sets metacategories, and you'll have purchased my buy-in.

Call me an old fart.

But I'm thinking of starting up a blog called, "Get off my lawn!".

But seriously if you think that what I have to say is interesting you really need to go outside. /Anybody want to subscribe to my newsletter?
"Get off my lawn Digest."

Me and my good buddy Google

"Hey Google!" I exclaim on my blog. "Hello user." "I heard you were working on Blogger." "Uhhh." "What was that? What are you planning to do with Blogger?" "Update." "Update?" "update Blogger, user." "Beta?" "Yes user! Wait, no." "Haha! I trust you Google" as I slap my TFT heartily on--what could be its--back. I always say a little dialouge never hurst in the morning. I heart Blogger, BTW [blogspot.com]

Beta again?

Here are the new features of Blogger Beta, a new blogging platform: [...]

You mean "Back to the Feature"?

Popular search engines faster [friskr.com]

Non-blogspot hosting?

A lot of these new features sound like they require server-side support. Do they still support publishing to servers other than BlogSpot? I don't use it and would prefer not to.

Re: WYSIWYG editing

The cool thing that always distinguished Blogger for me was the freedom they gave you to edit the underlying page code. Myspace gives you that freedom, too -- but have you ever seen the code? (I still don't understand how their web pages just don't crumble in a heap of broken tags.)

Blogger offers direct access to (near) standards-compliant XHTML code. I practically learned how to design websites tinkering with their templates. If you know HTML and CSS, it gives you everything you'd want with Google Pages.

I just hope they don't start limiting this as they expand the WYSIWYG bells and whistles.

Finaly saving on Googleware cycles

No more waiting for the publishing indicator to creep its way up to 100%.
At last you decided to save on your CPU cycles and also have a faster means to index rather than crawling the static page.

tags for future and past posts?

tag-based labels for categories.

Anybody know if this will be implemented for future entries only, or if you can go back and tag your old posts?

It would be convenient if they added a way to search your blog for keywords, and tag all matching entries.

sftp fix?

I just hope they'll get around to fixing their long-standing sftp publishing [google.com] problem....

JavaScript redirect

And hopefully someone with a clue finally fixed the ability that users can redirect blogspot blogs to a spam site by inserting JavaScript (document.location) in their templates (see: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2006/07/13/ [johnbokma.com] )

Cool

I use their blogspot.com for my web comic just becaues it's fast and easy, but it definitely lacked (until now maybe) some features that you'd expect. For example, if you want to use an image in your template, they recommend you post it and then reference the post. In other words, you don't have true web space you can upload to use freely, so it can be annoying to, for example, make header/footer graphics.

Well behind the competition

Seriously. Since May, WordPress.com has added XML import/export, custom headers, mobile support, new widgets, related tag surfer [wordpress.com], comment tracking... plus it has always had blog stats, and migrating from Blogger was a snap. I'm glad I moved. I can't believe the mighty Google has taken so long to even start thinking about fixing Blogge.