The New Blogger, with cool features - Review

On August 14th, Blogger went live with its new version in Beta. Well, its not yet completely available to all the existing blogs. Like all google products or acquisitions, this too is on a "entry by invite" basis. But, as they say, everyone should ultimately have access to it. But, if you can't wait to try out the new features on your existing blog, all you have to do is to create a new account and create a test blog, which is automatically linked to the newer version of blogger! This is what i did and I was impressed by the new features.

First and foremost,the dashboard looks different, with the basic tasks on a blog being available right on the dashboard. This eliminates the need to first go to a blog's admin page and then choose the action, if you maintain multiple blogs. Click to see a bigger picture.

So, i created a blog and made my first post. The "Create Post" screen has been modified to include an option for allocating labels for a particular post. No idea why Blogger took this long to implement this, as this has been available for long on other blogging platforms. "Labels" enable to categorize posts on your blog to enable easy access to your blog readers. For example, if you have a general blog, but also report about the quizzes happening in your city, you can categorize such posts under the label "quiz", so that readers can directly access all blogs related to the quizzes.

I created a "testing" label and created a sample post. I had chosen one of the many standard templates available. In fact, in this new version, lot of new templates are available as part of the standard templates.

Now comes the best new feature, that of customising templates and changing their appearance. Until now, if you wanted to change the look and feel of your blog, you needed to know some basic html or CSS to achieve the results. But now, you just need to know to use the mouse. Yes, as simple as that. With a few drag and drops, I was able to change the look of my blog, i.e. the way the different sections are organised. It would have been a monumental task to achieve this in the previous version. But, this takes out the fun of playing with CSS. My current site is heavily customised and it was a good learning experience for me to play around with CSS and change the code. But, i guess, it pays for blogger to provide such interfaces as not all bloggers would be interested in dirtying their hands with code. The new look with sections moved around (just a drag and drop of the mouse) is shown below

Doing the above modifications would involve copy-paste activities of CSS code, if you were to do it manually. But, if you wanted to change the colour-schema, you would have to spend lot more time in identifying where these definitions are made. No need for it now. Just go to the fonts and colors sections and control the colours of each and every individual aspect possible.

The new blogger has eliminated one more step in publishing the blog. In fact, now you don't need to publish the blog everytime you make a change in your settings. The moment you save the settings, blogger automatically publishes the blog, making it ready for viewing.

For the official blogger buzz on the new release, head over to The Blogger Buzz blog entry, where you can take a tour of the new features. Enjoy these features, as I am sure that these are going to make blogging an even more satisfying experience. Btw, news is that Wordpress is charging 15 Dollars for the facility to customise their blog templates. Blogger has always made customising templates available for free and now, they are providing tools to make that easy. Three cheers to Blogger!