Fast Fiction

Now that I’ve had a few weeks to live with it, I love the new blogger interface.

It’s more powerful - it’s a better way of working with a large blog (let’s face it, I have hundreds of entries and have had trouble doing trackbacks to my own entries because I couldn’t even search by month on the old version.)

What’s good:
1. The homepage is spare - the old homepage would have load problems because it would have to reference the database for the recently updated list. Lets face it, the vast majority of us are here to work on our blogs… if we want to see all that other stuff, we’ll go look at it. Thanks.

2. Search is available in the edit area. Let’s face it, once you get more than 100 entries or more than 1 year under your belt, you need a search feature to find stuff.

3. Previous posts by title instead of just a code number.

4. Stats for your blog are available in your profile (finally, I know how many posts I’ve made), and number of words written.

5. Preview - it allows me to see my text in format, not necessarily in my stylesheet but at least I can check the links easily.

What’s bad:
1. I’d like more control over my template - and I’d like that part to be clearer. A WYSIWYG editor would be great, but besides that, some way to have the list of the blogger codes displayed in the same window as the template would be very helpful. Sometimes I just want to go in and do one small thing and I have to have three windows open to tweak my template.

2. No post links available within the edit section. I want to be able to reference previous posts without opening another window to my blog and searching them out. It shouldn’t be that hard to have it in the edit section somewhere.

3. Stats for the blogs are not always accurate. Sometimes Spambiguity says that it only has one post, when it has over 15 so far.

4. Stats.blogger.com is still wonky. 9 times out of 10 when I try to go there, I get the white DNS error screen. Why is that?

Other things I’d like:

1. Option on the create a link within a post tool to have it automatically prompt me if I want it to open in a new window. Right now I hand code most of that. Same with photos - MT lets me upload a photo and it will offer to make a thumbnail and an autosized pop up version of the image.