Google Upgrades Blogger

thetan writes "Google has announced the first major upgrade to Blogger since taking over the creaking old platform. Still in beta, the new service offers a tie-in to your Google Account, dynamic pages, separate comment feeds, new layouts, an apparent merger with Google's Page Creator for WYSIWYG editing, integration of feeds, public/private access control and — of interest to bloghackers — tag-based labels for categories. Take the tour."

Comments

When to use Tags (versus Categories)

[davevt5]

I think the addition of labels is the most significant upgrade to Blogger. Now, if only I could tag my Slashdot Journal entries.

I do have a question. Many blogs support both Categories and Tags. I understand Google's desire to simplify things, so I think if I could have only one or the other, I'd choose tags. Now that Moveable Type 3.3 has come out and natively supports both tags and categories, I'm at a loss as to when to use which. Do I stick w/ my Categories and leave tagging for a tag cloud and for hooks for Technorati?

Re:When to use Tags (versus Categories)

[spyrochaete]

Tags are better to facilitate searching, categories are better to steer your regular readers. Chris Pirillo uses extensive tags in his blog while Poh Huai Bin uses categories in his.

As regular readers of both I MUCH prefer categories. If I'm interested in what one of my blog heros has to say on a broad topic I have a lot more success and fun browsing through everything in a category than by trying to figure out some arbitrary keyword.

You do what you feel suits your blog content and organization best, but if it were me I'd set up categories. I might be old fashioned, though.

Re:When to use Tags (versus Categories)

[DerekLyons]

As regular readers of both I MUCH prefer categories. If I'm interested in what one of my blog heros has to say on a broad topic I have a lot more success and fun browsing through everything in a category than by trying to figure out some arbitrary keyword.

Categories also allow your users to read 'virtual blogs'. On several blogs that I read regularly, I don't have the main page bookmarked - but rather one or more category pages. This allows me to read entries on say, geocaching, while avoiding entries on cats.

Bloghackers?

[Zouden]

"Bloghackers"
That is just so Web 2.0, isn't it?

Re:Bloghackers?

[baadger]

I think the Roman's have prior art on that one mate.

Re:Bloghackers?

[thetan]

The aforementioned "enthusiasts who extend Blogger in useful, novel and unexpected ways" are still digesting the implications of this change for their carefully-constructed, hand-wrought hacks. Especially those that supplement Blogger's lack of categories and comment feeds.

A good jumping off point can be found at this post: Blogger Beta Explored.

"tie-in to your google account"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just a "tie-in", but a forced migration, similar to flickr moving to using yahoo accounts:

Blogger moves to Google Accounts, so your account will be more secure and you don't have to remember extra credentials.

Am I the only one really disliking this? I don't want to tie all the pieces of information about me together. I want to keep them separate, running on different domains, having nothing to do with each other! It's bad enough that Google can tie my searches to my email, but when it's able to tie it together with my cat pictures and what I had for dinner last night (okay, so not really), that's really several bridges too far.

Re:"tie-in to your google account"

[Gospodin]

Not fair! I want to be able to keep all my data private and my accounts separate, but also get all the benefits of letting Google see all my data and keeping my accounts in one place. We can send a man to the moon but we can't do this?!

Even better than MySpace

[andrewman327]

Nano? I'll stick with notepad.

I am glad that Google has made this upgrade. Blogger has always had a pretty clean layout that doesn't get in the way of the content (are you listening MySpace?) and makes sites pretty easy to read. Ever since they announced Google Pages I wondered when they were going to integrate it into Blogger. I played with Pages and found that while it lacks power and advanced features, it just plain works. That is the most important thing. After all, most people above a certain coding ability will probably have their own sites and will not be using Blogger in the first place.

You know that Google has come up with something great when they announce that it has made it out of testing and into Beta stage.

Re:Even better than MySpace

[mgblst]

Wake me up when Google page creator lets you create directories. I am sure they have a great reason for not allowing people to do it now.

Re:Even better than MySpace

[generic-man]

Right. I wish I could have a web service that everyone fawned over, yet when it went down those same people would immediately understand with "It's okay, it's beta."

Call me back when it's been released. I've used Blogger for years and frankly I don't like being jerked around with features I didn't ask for at the cost of reliability. Remember when only beta testers got to use beta software, leaving the rest of us with a presumably stable release?

Re:Even better than MySpace

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear generic-man,

Your concerns have been heard. Here is your refund.

Sincerely,

Google

Re:Even better than MySpace

[Shaper_pmp]

Notepad? Notepad?

You were lucky... When I were a lad we'd walk 30 miles in the snow to the office, uphill both ways. We'd spend all day hunched over with a length of wire and a rare-earth magnet, inducing currents in the wires to build up ASCII codes. When we'd finished we'd manually upload the files by telnetting to port 21, walk 30 miles 'ome again, oop'ill, in t' snow, eat a piece of dry bread for us tea, and me Dad would beat us t' sleep wi' a length of co-ax cabling...

Re:Even better than MySpace

[generic-man]

Thanks!

--- Original Message ---

Re:Even better than MySpace
(Score:1, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on 08:17 AM August 15th, 2006 (#15910369)
Dear generic-man,

Your concerns have been heard. Here is your refund.

Sincerely,

Google

Re:Even better than MySpace

[Columcille]

It was even worse for me. I used ed.

Re:I'll Stick to nano

[baadger]

nano?

Give me a break, emacs has supported whatever it is this article is about for too long now.

OpenID?

[kid-noodle]

But does it support OpenID? Can I maintain a cross blogsite friends list? Honest question actually - why don't LJ, Blogger et al. allow you to maintain a friends lists across sites, along with an integrated feed of their blogs? I could write a blog app for my site that generated a feed from my friends across sites, but its a bit useless unless you can run it both ways. I could use a blog client that crossposted to several sites - but that's a messy unintegrated solution that just clutters up the net with dupes.. Obviously sites aren't keen on effectively pimping out their competitors, but the arguments here are the same as those for open document formats and cross compatibility in software, unless I'm missing a trick (or a whole magic show)?

Re:I'll Stick to nano

[Abcd1234]

Meh, that's what Vi is for. ;)

KISS

[jetxee]

Wake me up when Google page creator lets you create directories. I am sure they have a great reason for not allowing people to do it now.

Yes. This is the reason: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

tags for future and past posts?

[amrust]

tag-based labels for categories.

Anybody know if this will be implemented for future entries only, or if you can go back and tag your old posts?

It would be convenient if they added a way to search your blog for keywords, and tag all matching entries.

Re:I want an updatel filters comments out

[ostermei]

They already have that, to a certain extent. Just check enable "Show word verification for comments?" on the Comments setting page for your blog to put in a human test not unlike the one /. uses for posting comments.

I kept this off when I first put up my blog and got hit with a few spam comments before I figured out what was happening. Turned on the word verification and deleted the handful of spam comments, and haven't seen one since (or any comments for that matter... but I think that's a different problem ;)