Blogger gets a facelift
One of the original (but not necessarily the best) free blogging services, Google’s Blogger, has had a makeover and some new features have been added. And about time too.
What was once cutting edge is now distinctly laclustre, unless you invest time and energy into finding some of the ‘hacks’ for the system that make it more interesting.
Selected Bloggers are being given the chance to try it out on their existing blogs, but anyone can try it by creating a new blog.
Some of the changes aren’t necessarily obvious to the blogger themselves, and are more to do with how Blogger works under the bonnet, but they include serving dynamic content pages instead of creating static HTML each time, and providing RSS 2 feeds (at last!). If you don’t know or don’t care what that is – don’t worry – but it makes it easier to get hold of the content through feed readers – should you want to read the 5 Blogger blogs that are actually any good…
There are new privacy settings and a drag-n-drop layout system for
designing your template. They’ve even added tagging (yeah, got to the
party a bit late) but decided to call them ‘labels’. Oh well.
I can’t get too excited about free hosted blogging platforms, really,
as I’m a customisation freak that needs to get hold of the code and
break it as much as possible. Still, it’s a step in the right direction
for a company that I’d have expected to keep ahead of the blogging
game. At least it’s somewhere close to the pack again.
Check out the beta here.
(Via Mashable!)
