Mar 31, 2011

The Amazing Changes Coming to Blogger

There are some new features for Blogger that are coming down the pipeline and some that maybe you haven't noticed. In September 2010 after participating in a Google usability study for Blogger I suggested garden bloggers sign up for the program. At the time I couldn't reveal one of the features they showed me, but since they've now blogged about  them I guess it is OK to blog about this myself For those of us who have always felt the post editor was too small, there's good news. The post editor is getting an upgrade!



Look at this screen grab of the changes coming to the post editor. The part I'm really excited about is the Import feature that will allow you to import a blog post you've drafted somewhere else like either in a word editing program or Google Docs. 

See this video for a tour of some of the new changes and statistics of Blogger users. 



Back in December they announced mobile templates so people who browse the internet with smartphones can access your blogs even easier.  There's also a Blogger Android App so you can write blog posts right from your phone. I've noticed that a large portion of the garden blogger community hasn't been taking advantaged of the new Blogger Template Designer, I'm guilty of it myself where this blog is concerned, but I highly recommend it. Although, the web fonts feature in Blogger has been better embraced by the gardening community on Blogger. 

Not satisfied with the traditional blog format of your blog? Today Blogger announced a few new template views that use AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3 to give you some amazing options in displaying the content of your garden blog. 


See this post for links to live demos of the new views. 

I'm really excited and I'm glad I never made the jump to Wordpress. 


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8 comments:

  1. Thanks for telling me about these changes.

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  2. Just tried it, it's really impressive what they've done.

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  3. Very coool, MBT. Thanks for the update.

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  4. thanks for the update! i'm afraid i get going in one direction and forget to keep up with the technology!

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  5. Looks good but I don't see anything worth jumping back to Blogger from Wordpress for. It's nice to see Blogger catching up to Wordpress in the mobile department.

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  6. Gimme that updated post editor now!

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  7. I haven't used the template designer mostly because a lot of the blogs that have strike me as looking cluttered: photo in the background (which almost always reduces the readability of the blog for me), a different font every five words, slideshows, auto-playing music, six types of ads, twenty different badges in the sidebar, search buttons, subscribe buttons, buttons for Twitter and Facebook, lists of followers -- everything but, you know, actual content. That's not necessarily the fault of the template designer, but I don't think the template designer is helping, either.

    I'm noticing that all the kids seem to be hot for blogging on Tumblr now. I don't understand why Tumblr, as opposed to Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, etc., but I'm sure there must be a reason. A lot of those templates are at least fairly clean and open, which I approve of.

    Don't know how I feel about the new post editor. I recognize that the old post editor is awkward and suboptimal, but I'm accustomed to working around it now.

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  8. YAY finally mobile blogging! and real time stats, exciting!

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