Sunday, December 31, 2006

I hate the Blogger "beta"

This Blogger beta is no longer beta, I guess, but you could have fooled me. It's clumsy, time-consuming, and primitive. I've been using it for weeks now and still cannot, from IE7, use the "send to blogger" feature. I've written the self-help forum, and nothing has happened. They're ignoring the fact they have a substandard implementation going on.

Bottom line: If you haven't converted yet, don't until they drag you kicking and screaming.

Here's some self-serving, gratuitous crap they dished up 12/19--

The New Version of Blogger

The new version of Blogger in beta is dead!
Long live the new version of Blogger!
(P.S. The old version of Blogger is not dead, but it would like to retire for a little while... maybe go to Hawaii or play World of Warcraft all day? It begs you to let it play World of Warcraft all day.)


I am overjoyed to announce that today we have o’ficially graduated the new version of Blogger from “in beta” to “.” Why is this significant? Allow me to explain via analogy:

Battlestar Galactica with Lorne Greene : Battlestar Galactica with Edward James Olmos :: Old Blogger : New Blogger

The new version of Blogger is metaphorically bursting with features, from the big guns like drag-and-drop template editing and post labels (which are perfect, by the way, for indexing the 131 historical figures you may have written about), to little polishes like a better-designed Dashboard or that you no longer need to solve a word verification CAPTCHA to post a comment on your own blog.

We’re excited about the new version of Blogger, both for what it can do now (which also includes access control for blogs and better input fields for post dates) and what we’ll add to it in the future, now that we have a new, stable, powerful infrastructure to work with. We’re done with “beta,” but we’re far from done with the new Blogger.

It’ll still take a bit more transition time to move everyone from the old version to the new, so for now we ask on our homepage which version of Blogger you use. If you’ve been using the beta, either because you switched or because you created your account after 10 November 2006, click “New Blogger” and sign in with your Google Account.

If you haven’t yet switched, click “Old Blogger” and use the same Blogger account you’ve always used, or — and this is the better choice — click “Switch Now” button. After you sign in with or sign up for a Google Account (free!), you’ll be switched over to the new Blogger, which is both reassuringly the same (your blogs will keep the same URLs, and your templates and profile will be the same too) and significantly better (see above sampling of new features and comparisons to a masterful science fiction television program).

Finally, shouts out to all of the people and teams who have made this possible; the new Blogger is the combined effort of engineering, QA, support, management, product, marketing, PR, infrastructure, [music swells] design, partners, clients, users, hackers, Blog*Stars, cats, dogs, ferrets, and everyone and everything else that helped, assisted, or enabled. Thank you!
— Pete [12/19/06 5:30 PM]

5 comments:

  1. Wow. I was feeling sorry for myself because I had no shoes, and now here comes this guy with no feet...

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  2. I feel your pain(s). I was depressed that I couldn't switch over, then I figured it out and now, eh. nothing's different much.

    happy new year fellas.

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  3. And a Happy New Year to you, too, Jill. Does WordPress beckon?

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  4. Sorry to crash your blog, but I just switched and I too HATE the new blogger! I have to login with my e-mail which is much longer and I read their info about changing your template and it sounds like our html will no longer be accessible!?!? Do you know? Also, I now have labels on my blog, but no way to add labels to new posts. Hello? I've been blogging for two years. What's the point of "organizing" my posts if I can't do all of them. Grrr.

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  5. Jordan, I switched my templates over just this past Saturday and lost a lot of the little statcounters and things, but the links transferred over. I didn't have anything fancy in my html, and the new way of handling all the little statcounters makes more sense to me in the beta-that's-no-longer-beta.

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