Blogger Gets A Facelift
Posted September 4, 2006Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), Google’s trailblazing hosted blog service, is going to be getting a facelift in the near future. While the “new” Blogger will retain its easy to use and accessible interface, it will feature some new an innovative features (relative to its current incarnation).
Access Control
Up until this point, there was no real (short of implementing an .htaccsss password) to limit access to your blog. With the new version of Blogger, you’ll be able to set your blog as private, accessible only to specific people who you set. This is particularly useful for project blogs to which you only want project members to have access. Its also useful for family blogs.
Labels/Categories
The new Blogger will now allow you to organize posts into specific categories, thereby allowing your readers to filter posts. This is a feature which is pretty much standard for any moderately robust blog system (hosted or installed), but has been lacking from Blogger.
Layout
Using the new layouts feature, you’ll be able to move around parts of your part in an easy drag-and-drop kind of way. You’ll also be able to choose new fonts and colors with a few mouse clicks. When you change colors and fonts, you’ll see a preview of the blog in real-time, so it’s easier to decide what’s the best choice.Even though Blogger has some expertly designed templates, changing those templates has always required a fairly deep knowledge of XHTML and CSS. For Blogger’s primary audience (casual & “quick” bloggers) changing a template’s code was often prohibitive. So, these new layout features will certainly be welcome - especially to those who don’t want to futz with XHTML and CSS.
Feeds Galore
“In addition to the usual feed of your blog posts, you can have a feed for all the comments on your blog, and even individual feeds for all the comments on each separate post. Your visitors can use these feeds to find out if someone responds to their comments, or to follow discussions on your blog. The default format of the feeds will be upgraded from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0. Also, for you die-hard RSS fans out there, you’ll be able to optionally get all feeds in RSS 2.0 format instead of Atom.”
New Dashboard
The Blogger Dashboard will be getting a nice and shiny new coat of paint.
Google Accounts
Perhaps one of the most noteworthy features of the “new” Blogger is the fact that authentication is going to be moving over to Google accounts. This means that, generally speaking, your Blogger account will be more secure. It also means that you’ll be able to use your Goggle login/password to access your Blogger account - thereby removing the necessity to remember yet another password.All in all, it looks like this new version of Blogger will be very slick. While many of the new features aren’t that innovative to those who work with other blog platforms (such as WordPress), they will be very welcome to those who use Blogger because they don’t have the time, inclination, or knowledge to go through the (often technical) shenanigans involved with installing and setting up a blog on their own server. Blogger’s power lies in the fact that its a popularity system - easy to access and use to the average joe or jane shmoe.For the moment, the “new” Blogger is available by invite-only. “The Blogger in beta program is going to start out small, so only a low percentage of people who log in to Blogger will see the option to switch over. If you’re one of them, you’ll see a blue box in the sidebar of your dashboard highlighting the new Blogger in beta.” If you want to test the new Blogger by creating a new blog you can do that at beta.blogger.com. Here’s a test blog created with the new platform and a tour that shows the new features.