More on Beta Blogger

This is an answer to Mary's comment on my last post asking about Beta Blogger, but I thought it might be useful to turn it into a post rather than leave it in the comments.

Beta blogger is being made available gradually. You can only switch if you get a "switch to beta blogger" button on your dashboard or on the blog publishing page. Mine appeared yesterday so I took advantage of it - mainly because the one thing about blogger that frustrated me was not having labels. Switching is very straightforward, though you do have to take out a Google account. Once you switch you have the option of switching your template to a "layout", which is really just a template that you can fiddle with much more easily by changing colours and fonts, and by adding extra elements (links, lists and so on). The only downside I have found so far is that you lose any html changes you made to your original template - though as I had only made one or two I can live with that. Oh, and you can end up spending far too much time playing with blog colours, only to decide you don't like any of them!

Editing and publishing both posts and sidebar elements is much easier. You get a little edit button on the screen next to each post and page element. Everything is more instant, posting directly to your blog without having to wait for it to publish. One other small improvement is that when blogger notifies you that a comment has been posted, it tells you which post it applies to. There may be more that I haven't noticed yet.

Now to go through my old posts and add labels ...