Last night I finally had the oppor­tu­nity to change over to the new blog­ger sys­tem and it’s asso­cia­ted impro­ve­ments. My main rea­son for shif­ting was the inc­lu­sion of labels — finally I can cate­go­rize my posts and pro­vide easy access to cer­tain topics. The lack of labe­ling or cate­go­ri­za­tion had temp­ted me to migrate to Word­press but alas I have stuck with Blog­ger and I may make it through this dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion period also. My first pro­cess lead me to check tem­pla­tes loa­ded OK and blogs could be fully published as usual. This lead me to a few discoveries:

• Upon migra­tion the URL for archi­ves was reset so all upda­ted archi­ves lin­ked to a 404. I quickly fixed this once my ser­ver, that has been up and down a bit lately, allo­wed me back into the FTP.
• Pre­vious Post links have stop­ped wor­king, the con­ven­tio­nal tag ins­tead of pro­vi­ding a list of the 10 posts prior to the post being vie­wed now shows only the ten most recent posts. This makes navi­ga­tion of the older pages less fluid and to find old posts you need to visit label pages or archive pages with the aim of fin­ding a spe­ci­fic post. 
• The uploa­ding dia­lo­gue for blog­ger has also been twea­ked, it now shows the suc­cess­fully uploa­ded files in a list and when errors occurs it tells you them. A nice addi­tion to this would be a sug­ges­tion on whether or not to per­form a repu­blish based upon the seve­rity of FTP errors. When I see the errors I ask myself whether or not all the files uploa­ded ok — the last thing I need is a corrup­ted page that I don’t know about. One caveat of this new sys­tem is the remo­val of the per­cen­tage uploa­ded indi­ca­tor, I like to know how far through the pro­cess is and whether or not con­nec­ti­vity is good or bad, taking away the only indi­ca­tion seems wrong to me. Hope­fully it is just part of the ine­vi­ta­ble blog­ger beta ftp teething stages. 

Moving onwards, once I had con­fir­med files could be uploa­ded and my tem­plate would not be utterly des­tro­yed I chose to add labels to my posts before publishing the blog again. It is now that I dis­co­ve­red the new tem­plate sys­tem blog­ger has deve­lo­ped and is imple­men­ting, one in which blog style edi­ting is made easy for those that do not know code, html or css etc. Sim­ple colour pic­king sche­mes etc. Howe­ver in doing this they seem to have com­ple­tely aban­do­ned the tem­plate tag tech­ni­que which I like to use to fully cus­to­mize my tem­plate design. Back­wards com­pa­ti­bi­lity remains yet under my exis­ting html tem­pla­tes I can­not add the new shiny fea­tu­res. Blog­ger also pro­vi­des no tem­plate tags for these fea­tu­res, ins­tead opting for defi­ned wid­gets and sec­tions. After publishing I also noti­ced that labels were auto­ma­ti­cally appen­ded to the post body in a sepa­rate div with the name “blogger-labels”. The text “Labels:” can­not be alte­red in any­way and I have had to use abso­lu­tely posi­tio­ned CSS to shift the labels into the com­ments bar where I want them and alter the hyper­link for­mat. Here are a few other pro­blems I noted: 

• Labels with a gap in there name e.g. “My Life” would link to a labels page: “labels/My Life.php” without subs­ti­tu­ting the space for a ‘-’ cha­rac­ter or remo­ving capi­ta­li­za­tion (e.g. labels/my– life.php)
• The labels direc­tory is not cus­to­mi­za­ble and is fixed to the “/labels/” default.
• No pagi­na­tion occurs on the label pages, des­pite the num­ber of posts — one of my labels has 33 posts and they all load to create a mam­moth scro­lling fiasco. 
• When labels have a gap in their name they do not show up in the labels sec­tion on the indi­vi­dual post page — I noti­ced this and tes­ted it to check it had uploa­ded correctly. All pages that I had applied the label “My Life” to did not show any labels, though others did. I have since chan­ged the label title but it is an issue that needs fixing. 

Finally I deci­ded to post something new. The inc­lu­sion of a quick switch bet­ween html and rich for­mat­ting is an exce­llent addi­tion that is very handy. Pos­ting via a 1280x reso­lu­tion the blog­ger post box seems very small. I like a large area to play with and it would be nice if the box could expand to fill the whole screen, much like in Gmail.

The inter­face is all very fluid and fast, quickly pulling up 160 posts and labe­ling them was not a daun­ting task as I had expec­ted. The dash­board makeo­ver also impro­ves usa­bi­lity, I now only need one click to reach cer­tain regu­larly visi­ted sections.

I now have one plea: Please do not aban­don the tem­plate tags scheme. I love it and use it suc­cess­fully to create my blog exactly how I want it. Please main­tain these tags and add res­pec­tive ones so that us power users can con­ti­nue using blog­ger and its new fea­tu­res in the same way we always have done. We do not need to uti­lize sim­pli­fied tem­plate edi­ting tech­ni­ques and whilst two sepa­rate sche­mes never seem wise I don’t know why they cant run side by side — lea­ving the tem­pla­tes tag as an advan­ced yet main­tai­ned option for those with a little more knowhow.

This is still in beta so I can remain hope­ful for chan­ges, it is nice to finally see some chan­ges and I do feel that Blog­ger is moving in the right direction.