The Issues with Blogger in Beta
Thursday, November 09, 2006

Last night I finally had the opportunity to change over to the new blogger system and it's associated improvements. My main reason for shifting was the inclusion of labels - finally I can categorize my posts and provide easy access to certain topics. The lack of labeling or categorization had tempted me to migrate to Wordpress but alas I have stuck with Blogger and I may make it through this difficult transition period also. My first process lead me to check templates loaded OK and blogs could be fully published as usual. This lead me to a few discoveries:

• Upon migration the URL for archives was reset so all updated archives linked to a 404. I quickly fixed this once my server, that has been up and down a bit lately, allowed me back into the FTP.
• Previous Post links have stopped working, the conventional tag instead of providing a list of the 10 posts prior to the post being viewed now shows only the ten most recent posts. This makes navigation of the older pages less fluid and to find old posts you need to visit label pages or archive pages with the aim of finding a specific post.
• The uploading dialogue for blogger has also been tweaked, it now shows the successfully uploaded files in a list and when errors occurs it tells you them. A nice addition to this would be a suggestion on whether or not to perform a republish based upon the severity of FTP errors. When I see the errors I ask myself whether or not all the files uploaded ok - the last thing I need is a corrupted page that I don't know about. One caveat of this new system is the removal of the percentage uploaded indicator, I like to know how far through the process is and whether or not connectivity is good or bad, taking away the only indication seems wrong to me. Hopefully it is just part of the inevitable blogger beta ftp teething stages.

Moving onwards, once I had confirmed files could be uploaded and my template would not be utterly destroyed I chose to add labels to my posts before publishing the blog again. It is now that I discovered the new template system blogger has developed and is implementing, one in which blog style editing is made easy for those that do not know code, html or css etc. Simple colour picking schemes etc. However in doing this they seem to have completely abandoned the template tag technique which I like to use to fully customize my template design. Backwards compatibility remains yet under my existing html templates I cannot add the new shiny features. Blogger also provides no template tags for these features, instead opting for defined widgets and sections. After publishing I also noticed that labels were automatically appended to the post body in a separate div with the name "blogger-labels". The text "Labels:" cannot be altered in anyway and I have had to use absolutely positioned CSS to shift the labels into the comments bar where I want them and alter the hyperlink format. Here are a few other problems I noted:

• Labels with a gap in there name e.g. "My Life" would link to a labels page: "labels/My Life.php" without substituting the space for a '-' character or removing capitalization (e.g. labels/my- life.php)
• The labels directory is not customizable and is fixed to the "/labels/" default.
• No pagination occurs on the label pages, despite the number of posts - one of my labels has 33 posts and they all load to create a mammoth scrolling fiasco.
• When labels have a gap in their name they do not show up in the labels section on the individual post page - I noticed this and tested it to check it had uploaded correctly. All pages that I had applied the label "My Life" to did not show any labels, though others did. I have since changed the label title but it is an issue that needs fixing.

Finally I decided to post something new. The inclusion of a quick switch between html and rich formatting is an excellent addition that is very handy. Posting via a 1280x resolution the blogger post box seems very small. I like a large area to play with and it would be nice if the box could expand to fill the whole screen, much like in Gmail.

The interface is all very fluid and fast, quickly pulling up 160 posts and labeling them was not a daunting task as I had expected. The dashboard makeover also improves usability, I now only need one click to reach certain regularly visited sections.

I now have one plea: Please do not abandon the template tags scheme. I love it and use it successfully to create my blog exactly how I want it. Please maintain these tags and add respective ones so that us power users can continue using blogger and its new features in the same way we always have done. We do not need to utilize simplified template editing techniques and whilst two separate schemes never seem wise I don't know why they cant run side by side - leaving the templates tag as an advanced yet maintained option for those with a little more knowhow.

This is still in beta so I can remain hopeful for changes, it is nice to finally see some changes and I do feel that Blogger is moving in the right direction.

Labels: Technical, Website

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