Cutting Free

NOTE: This post was made before I moved to Blogsome. I’ve kept it because it may be useful to some.

When I started this blog, the Blogger.com site informed me that they (in typical Google style) had a beta version of Blogger (beta.blogger.com), and gave me the opportunity to use that service. Given that this blog is about the cutting edge, I, of course, took the plunge.

Categories

One of the reasons I was happy to move is that the Beta Blogger allows for post categories. Actually, they call them "labels" (like in GMail). In fact, they are what are more generally known as "tags" (as in del.icio.us). I call them "Categories", over on your right, but I might change it to "Tags".

The lack of "Categories" was a major shortcoming in Blogger for a long time. I am glad to see Google applying their usual ingenuity to this service. In fact, that missing feature very nearly stopped me from using Blogger (I hadn’t heard about Beta Blogger at that point).

Templates

The templates have also been completely overhauled.

If you choose one of the new Beta templates (many are updated versions of the old ones), the new interface enables you to drag-and-drop components around. This is in quite a restricted manner, but it’s still an excellent feature. You are also able to add components (including HTML snippets) to the template, using point-and-click, and there is probably no reason to edit the HTML directly.

JavaScript

The new interface relies heavily on JavaScript, and that doesn’t always seem to work in Firefox. However, that situation seems to have improved, even since last week. The problem seems to be aggravated by the NoScript extension. Even though I have Google and Blogger whitelisted, it still seems to stop working every so often. I’m not sure if they’re using a different domain for some scripts, but I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of it. Of course, the fault could lie with NoScript, rather than Beta Blogger.

Posting

Not having posted with the standard Blogger, I don’t know what the posting interface was like. However, the Beta posting interface is very nice. You can write your post with a rich-text interface, which has a good in-line preview. It also features a spell checker.

I would like to see the rich-text editor include headings. It allows you to change the font, the text size, and make things bold, but I like to use the standard "h" tags. To make my headings, I have to revert to the HTML editor, and type in my own "h3" tags.

Account

Beta Blogger can be used with your normal Google Account. You no longer need to create a Blogger one. A nice feature that would be more useful if they told you before you signed up.

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The new Beta Blogger is very slick, and holds the potential to live up to Google’s reputation. The new features are well worth signing up for. I have experienced no problems apart from the JavaScript issues with Firefox and NoScript.

If you use third-party tools to post to your Blogger blog, they probably won’t work with Beta, but I expect support will be implemented in most soon.

As you can see, my blog posts are now made available under the GNU Free Documentation License. I’m not sure how screenshots fit in with this, but if they’re OK, I’ll post some of Beta Blogger soon.

Links:

• Beta Blogger
• Review of Beta Blogger on bloghacker (a little out of date)
• Known issues with Beta Blogger

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