Blogger Beta

After reading all about it via Sirexkat and Peta‘s blogs, I’ve just been reading about and playing with the new Blogger Beta. (Yes, I have been that swamped/preoccupied/busy lately that I hadn’t realised this was available until I managed to catch up on some of my reading on Bloglines late this afternoon.)

How could I resist? Although I am tired and have a lot of packing to do, I clicked the option to swap. This gave me an onscreen message telling me that my blog was in the process of being moved to the beta, and that they would email me when the move was done. It was very nervewracking because I had no idea how long that would take! Thankfully this took a matter of minutes, and I’m now posting this using the new Blogger Beta.

So far so good. A lot of it still has the old Blogger feel, but already I have noted some nice features and am quite impressed. For instance, I like the fact that, logging in, I can now see how many posts I have written to date* (I had no idea, and hadn’t gotten around to trying to work out how to find that out in the old Blogger).

Other simple features also make me happy – like the fact that the new dashboard now shows you the number of comments to each post.

And if you read this blog by visiting the site directly you will note that it looks somewhat different at the moment – I had to change my template to the new layout, because I wanted to be able to use the new labels. WOOT – labels/categories/tags in Blogger! This is the one thing I have always wanted (must be the librarian in me). Presumably people using RSS won’t notice much difference – I am going to post this, just to check!

I look forward to checking out the new features in more detail in coming days.

*this is the 411th post!

P.S. I didn’t go to the bloggers meetup tonight – I thought it would be nice to have a quiet evening at home because I am going to Sydney tomorrow, and I am feeling a bit flat. Hopefully I am not coming down with jl’s cold!