I Like the New Blogger Beta (added to)

The Google company owns Blogger. Many of us out here in cyberspace use this program for our blogs. Blogger is an on-line program for creating and managing blog posts. One of its advantages is that it is free. Another is that, being on-line, you can use any computer with web access to post. Recently, one of the bloggers I subscribe to said that she was going to change her blog. Soon after, Blogger asked me, when I logged in to the site, if I would like to switch to the new version. Thinking that Grasshopper had done so, and that if it was good enough for her, it would be for me, I said yes. (Actually, she hasn't changed over yet. Oh, well.)

So what does the new version do for me (and for you, the hypothetical reader)?

Several things I have noticed. Probably some I haven't. This page gives a summary of the new features.

1) I can now enter labels for each post. This one has only one such, namely "Blogging." What's a label? A label is a category. If you, the reader, want to, you can click on the label, and you should quickly see the other posts I have marked with the same label. (Other blogging software has similar capability, and has for a long time.) That's great!

There's a downside -- I have posted roughly 500 posts, and there isn't any easy way to go back and label all the previous ones. I've labelled some of them, but not nearly all. Sorry.

2) There's a lot less need to fiddle with the internal workings of the HTML. There's a page for me where I can just drag and drop to establish the locations of various common features of a blog. I can change fonts and colors easily. In fact, I just changed my default text font to Verdana, which, I believe, is more legible on screen than Arial. Sorry, both of you faithful readers, if all these changes are making you dizzy!

3) I used to rely on another web site to generate my blogroll/list of the subscriptions I want to mention. I no longer have to do that. Blogger does that for me, and does it more easily. I can also name it anything I want to.

4) I can now choose whether to edit drafts (not yet posted musings), posts, or a mixture of the two, and there is more flexibility in getting to earlier posts. In fact, as I recall, I was not able to access more than the last 300 posts at all, in the previous version.

5) The archives now work better. If you really want to know what I was posting about in, say, July 2005, click on the little triangle beside the 2005. The months of 2005 drop down. Then click on the little triangle beside the July. There you are.

6) I can see (you can't) in my list of published posts, how many comments (if any) each received. This is helpful in, for example, deciding whether to delete a post entirely.

7) Added August 31, 2006: I have finally discovered that I no longer have to dig into the past to find the URLs of my old posts, when I want to link to them. The Edit Posts option includes a View, as well as Edit. If I View the post, the URL appears up there in a status bar (or something like that).

It's great! Now if I could just figure out what I should post, and when to write it . . .

Thanks for reading! Any suggestions would be appreciated.