Google Upgrades Blogger 109
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."
When to use Tags (versus Categories) (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
"tie-in to your google account" (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just a "tie-in", but a forced migration, similar to flickr moving to using yahoo accounts:
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.
Even better than MySpace (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenID? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'll Stick to nano (Score:1, Insightful)
When I first owned a Win95 box, I preferred DOS edit to notepad. Then I discovered UltraEdit, and it was all over.
Re:When to use Tags (versus Categories) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
KISS (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. This is the reason: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Re:Even better than MySpace (Score:4, Insightful)
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?