Google has announced an overhaul of Blogger, with new features including:
- Dynamic pages – this means that Blogger no longer renders static HTML pages, and will mean, among other things, that changing templates will become a lot easier.
- Post categories
- Separate feeds for comments
Take the tour of the new features. This overhaul addresses many of my big problems with the service; if only they had done this a year ago! Well, I’d likely have migrated to hosting my own blog, anyway—the increased flexibility you get by hosting yourself is too important to me to do otherwise—though I might have stayed with the service a bit longer. The service is in invitation-only beta right now, but hopefully it’ll be rolled out to the public soon. (Via Slashdot)
a list of the 15 websites that changed the world. From the part on Blogger:
‘The funny thing was I actually hesitated before working on Blogger because I didn’t see the commercial applications,’ says [Pyra Labs founder Evan] Williams. ‘We had started a company and we needed to make money. We didn’t see how this little hobbyist activity was going to make anyone money.’
The little hobbyist activity was blogging, the art of keeping a weblog – of diarising, theorising, satirising, fictionalising your life and observations online. It had already taken off among the tech fraternity in the Nineties, but it required building and maintaining your own website; the luddites were excluded. Williams created a tool that made self-publishing online as user-friendly as word-processing. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this innovation. It didn’t just create a new form of creative expression, it turned the media upside down.
Content was once made by companies for passive consumption by people. After Blogger, people were the content. They wrote about and read about their friends, their opinions, their cats. (There was a lot about cats in the early blogs.) None had a huge audience but collectively they were massive. ‘Now you see TV networks saying: “We’ve gotta get on the web because that’s where the audience is,”‘ says Williams.
(Via Slashdot)
You can set up an RSS feed for comments. For comments. How cool is that?
I’ve got enough complaints about this template and, after the past couple of days spent browsing the WordPress Codex, enough knowledge to start work on designing a custom template for this blog. Look out for one within the next couple (or more, since designing WP templates is a whole lot more complicated than doing the same for Blogger) of days. Here goes nothing.
I just successfully imported all my Blogger posts into the new blog with the aid of this tutorial and this tool. It worked like a charm with the exception that I had to hack the import-blogger.php file to force the import by adding a
$action = 'step1';
line after the opening
< $php
in the script.
The only thing I have to fix now is that all my archives look terrible–it’s all a mess of text with no formatting. I’m not sure if this is changeable in the settings, but I’ll play around and see if I can figure it out.
I’ve got shivers. This is my very first post on my brand new WordPress blog, hosted on my very own domain. I’ll probably be abandoning my old blog sometime soon, so keep checking back for an announcement of the final transition.
One of the coolest things about WordPress is its incredibly flexible template functionality. As soon as I figure it out (it is likewise complicated, so it might take a while), I will probably start making templates for WordPress, as well.
Template users for Blogger, never fear. I am not planning on taking down my Blogger template site, but you will probably see a drop-off in the frequency of adding new templates.
So I’ve been tossing around an idea for some time, but didn’t really have anyplace to go with it until my friend Arvind e-mailed me earlier this week. I’m thinking about defecting away from Blogger. Shocking, I know, but as good as it is for beginners and dilettantes (both of which I was not so long ago–and which you might argue I still am), Blogger definitely has its limitations: no search capability for the entire contents (including archives) of a blog, limited customizability, no integrated TrackBack functionality, no support for categories, etc.
Also, since I now have my own domain, I thought it might be nice to integrate my web presences in one place. In order to publish a blog on my own domain, however, I’d need blog publishing software. The main platform for doing this, of course, is Movable Type, but it is relatively expensive (read: not free), and therefore against the very spirit of blogging and the internet. Then there’s iBlog for Mac, which is also not free. As for free publishing software there are Greymatter and, the one my friend e-mailed me about, WordPress. I was pretty impressed with WordPress when I checked it out, and now I’ve installed it on my domain’s server, which was insanely easy (they advertise that you can do it in under 5 minutes).
Now for the hard part: making the decision. I’m all but ready to do it, except that I’d like to find some way of porting my old posts over, if possible. If not, it’s not like I’ll be deleting this blog anyway, so they won’t disappear. Hmmm.
a couple of new Blogger templates: Deco and Retro. Check ‘em out!
from all this Tiger reviewing for a couple of things:
- First, happy Cinco de Mayo!
- I am peeved at Blogger and have to gripe. I had intended to start my last post last night, and so had loaded the Create Post page in Blogger, but never came back to write it. So this morning when I sat down at my computer, I just started typing in the post content field and thought nothing of it. Of course, when I went to publish the post, Blogger said that since I had left the session running all night, my login session had expired, and asked me to log in again. I did. But instead of continuing to publish the post, Blogger just displayed the dashboard, and when I went to check my list of posts, the latest one wasn’t there. Why doesn’t Blogger continue a task it’s been asked to do through login? That’s just dumb. Luckily I was able to hit the back button on my browser, and the contents of my post were still cached, so I was able to publish the post eventually, but I could just as easily have lost the contents forever. Arrrggghh. This is an obvious functionality gap, and I, for one, am going to write them a nasty letter/bug report about it.