Blogger04 Redux

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It surprises me that among fellow bloggers of faith, all the reactions to the Relaunched Blogger have been decidedly negative. Well, okay, “all” two reactions I’ve seen: Joel, Josh (cached because he seems to have disappeared).

As I said earlier, I think the new Blogger is superb. The pages are well-structured and are finally laid out in CSS, the “Dashboard” interface gives your weblogs full front and center treatment, the framed post screen (I hated that, since frames are evil) is gone, the new profiles bring in some real social networking without being over-invasive, the individual entry pages are a bandwidth, archive, and readability lifesaver, and everything just feels cleaner and faster over “Old Black.” Aside from a few publish glitches here and there, I think they pulled off the relaunch as perfectly as they could.

What was your reaction, Blogger users?

Comments

  1. t says:
    2004-05-20 at 01:10

    i agree with everything you’ve said there. the only bad part is they’ve taken the lj route and you have to have an account or post anonymously, which is annoying as hell. but of course they had to do it that way, to ‘encourage’ people to sign up. but for people who already have a weblog via other means it just gets in the way

  2. cathy says:
    2004-05-20 at 08:06

    agree with you one hundred per cent.

    The CA t

  3. Jason says:
    2004-05-20 at 08:39

    Change is bad.

  4. Valerie (Kyriosity) says:
    2004-05-20 at 11:08

    Two good things I’ve noticed:

    1) Republishing after updating the template is easier — you don’t have to go back to another part of the site.

    2) Drafts now make sense. I almost always use the Blogger button on the Google toolbar. Before when I marked posts as drafts, it would publish them anyway. Now it actually marks them as drafts. Not only that, I can go to blogger.com and actually find them there, marked as drafts.

    I have no complaints so far. Of course if blogspot blogs would actually show up when I clicked on them, and my blog would actually publish when I published it, that’d be nice, but I don’t think that sort of thing is any worse than as bad as it’s always been.

  5. timsamoff says:
    2004-05-20 at 14:26

    I was quite astonished by how well they redeisnged Blogger… Almost to the point that I may switch to it one day (its ability to pubish pages to our own FTP directories is awesome).

  6. blake (i'm back) says:
    2004-05-20 at 16:43

    The NEW BLOGGER is so cool and easy to use, it made me want to start blogging again. Now I need to hire paulo to make me a real photo site! I will post primarily about music and food, since I eat out a lot and see bands…with lots of pictures!

  7. toni says:
    2004-05-20 at 23:11

    I LOVE this new Blogger. It’s more user-friendly. :)

  8. Roy Jacobsen says:
    2004-05-24 at 11:39

    I hate that they make you log on to a blogger account to post a comment, or you’re anonymous. (And some bloggers don’t allow anonymous comments.) Stifles dialog, that does. There have been more than a few times that has stopped me from commenting on somebody’s blog.