mohdimran.blogspot.com is on Blogger Beta

Yesterday, after signing to my blogger, there’s one link of the sidebar with the word beta in. I am really a beta junkie. I’d like to try new things, even they are still in beta. It happened to be that Blogger now has a new version Blogger in Beta.

Without further ado, I converted my blog to beta. There’s a warning, if you converted your blog to beta, you won’t be able to go back to your old blog. Hell yes. I’m ready for it.

Anyway, to convert to Blogger Beta, you need a Google account. If you are Gmail user already, it already means that you already have Google account. Nice. At last, Blogger has been integrated into Google account and become a part of what I called Google Suite 😉

After the conversion, I tried visiting my blog. Oh. It’s not accessible at the moment. Tick tock.. tick tock… I’m waiting for the confirmation email.

Yay! After 5 minutes, I received an email telling that the moving to the new Blogger is complete. Man. I can’t wait to see what new things that Blogger has in store.

Upon logging in, the Dashboard has a new look. That’s nice. At least I see something new. And when I go to the Posts Listing, it has a new look too.

Now you can see how many comments that you have for your post right from this page. You can also filter what to be listed – all posts, draft posts of published posts. Very handy indeed for me to find draft posts that I did long2 time ago, but never had chance to finish and publish it.

One major thing that I notice it, no more publishing. Yay! I believe other blogger user that constantly change the template has to go through the process of republishing the whole of the posts. This is no longer a case in Blogger Beta. Once you published you post, it’s there already. If you change something in the template, changes are applied to all the posts without the need to republish the whole blog.

One of the drawback that many find about changing the way their blog that use Blogger should looks like is the raw HTML template editing. Not many rather want to go through the learning curve of learning HTML language. Furthermore, every elements are dumped into a single file, not like Blogdrive where it has been seperated into components – header, sidebar, links etc.

Will this change in Blogger Beta? Well. I tried going to the template setting of my blog, and I’ve been given an option to upgrade if I want to customize my template.

But wait. Before I go on, let me backup my current template first, even though it says that the copy of my current template is kept automatically.

Nice. Very nice indeed. Not blogger template is made up of different elements, and you can arrange the elements just by doing drag and drop using your mouse. Just click edit if you want to edit that element.

You can also add new elements to your template. There are several 2 elements that interest – labels (now you can categorize your post using label) and blog archive (nested tree view of your post).

But the bad thing as for now is, you are bound to use the templates that have if you would like to use this kind of layouting. I tried edit the template, but the raw template editing is not available yet at the moment.

But I see a bright future about this. Later, I have a strong feeling that there will be an API where people can create custom page elements, the same as plugin concepts for those who are using WordPress before. This is going to be really interesting.

Lastly, do you ever think of using Blogger as you diary? I do, but it’s not a good option. The fact that anyone can go and read your blog entry, I rather not to write something that is too personal in my blog.

Blogger Beta makes this possible. Now, you can assign who are allowed to read your blog. I tried making my other experimental blog (the one that I use for template experimenting, and test entry) private.

Then, I tried visiting the blog. Walla! The blog is unaccessible, and I have to login first before I can enter the blog. Sweet!!

I’m so glad that I’m using Blogger as my blog, and I’m eager to see what more Blogger has to offer its user. Blogger teaming up with Google in the past has set me in this vision to see Blogger to become a very powerful blogging platform to choose.

I’m waiting with a hopeful heart….