12.24.06
Blogger Beta for everyone!
Seems like Blogger’s always (fashionably) late to the party nowadays right? The platform largely responsible for launching blogs into the mainstream is now reactionary. Little trinkets like labels, site feeds, and password protected entries are only now entering the Blogger service through its Beta Blogger — which is now open for all.
In an ocean filled with what seems like hundreds of blog providers, Blogger may no longer innovate but when it makes changes, it makes a huge impact. I mean, when Blogger add new features, or requires users to switch to new logins (Beta Blogger requires a Google Login), millions of blogs are impacted. Big ship, that blogger.
I’d been waiting for my own beta Blogger invite to appear on my various Blogger hosted blogs. When I finally got the opportunity, I was delighted. Here were the labels I was looking for, here was drag-and-drop template customization, here was better displays for archives, I loved it.
Then, I tried to take my non-blogspot.com hosted blogs over to beta Blogger. Bad news. If you were trying to FTP to Blogger, there were huge icebergs ahead. I spent a week panicking that my blogs would be no more. Online forums reported users who had lost blogs, users who could no longer publish, users who were stuck in limbo between old Blogger and beta Blogger. I had the same problems, mainly being unable to FTP to the domain of my choice.
Blogger Help was timely and helpful during that hand-wringing week, but I think I learned a valuable lesson here: always create a test blog before converting something over to a new platform. In addition, always save copies of your stuff. But you knew that already, right?
