Saturday, February 03, 2007

Not Updating For Four Days Was My Fault. The Fifth Day Wasn't.

OK, that last entry was actually meant to be posted ages and ages ago, but I made the mistake, when I went to update the blog, of checking to see whether perhaps Blogger actually meant it this time when they said they were ready for me to switch over to the new version. Surprisingly enough, they said they were, so I figured, hey, cool, I've got a little while before work, I can get that set up, make my post, play around with it a bit, see how it is.

So I told 'em to go ahead and was informed that it would probably take a few minutes, maybe a little longer if I had a large blog. A few minutes later I was told to be patient, it was still going, it'd be just a little while longer. Nearly six hours later, long after I'd already left for work, I got the notice that it was finally finished. Way to start me off on the right foot, Blogger. Sigh.

Anyway, everything looks slightly different now, which is throwing me off a bit, but I think the improvements noticeable so far may actually be improvements. Posting does seem to be a bit more convenient, at least, and they've adopted something very much like gmail's spellchecker interface, which I was practically begging them to do a year or so ago. So, yay for that, at least!

And I can tag posts with labels now, as you may notice at the bottom of this entry and the last one. That might be useful, somehow. (But, no, I'm not going to go back and retroactively tag the 2,000+ earlier posts. I'm not that obsessive.)

Do let me know if anything suddenly looks broken or weird. (In bad new ways, that is, as opposed to my usual weirdness.) I may do some experimenting with the layout, etc. at some point in the future, but that's certainly not happening tonight. Not after I had to wait six hours to get my stupid blog back.

9 comments:

  1. It seems to be working.

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  2. Ooh, and I don't have to fill out the prove-you're-a-human letters on my own comments any more! That's much nicer!

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  3. There's an improvement. It knows who I am without me having to tell it and displays "prove you're a human" letters before I click "publish my comment" instead of waiting until after.

    Assuming it works.

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  4. Huh. It always did that before, though, at least for me...

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  5. Oh, yes, though, I guess it will recognize anyone who's logged into a google/gmail account now, though, and not just people who are logged in to Blogger. So it should know a lot more people, I think.

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  6. Looks fine to me, too.

    Word Verification; tfthyds. Wasnt that a day when walking plants attacked a lighthouse?

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  7. Only if you have a lisp. :)

    And, ooh, I've discovered another nice feature! It actually puts my comment e-mails into threads on gmail now.

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  8. I'm still getting the word verification, and I'm logged in. In the old Blogger, you could change your settings to require verification or not. (I tried not, but that led to a flood of comment spam. Well, a small flood.)

    I also notice that when I do log out of GMail, I also get logged out of Blogger. This is a really minor annoyance, but some of us do have more than one GMail account.

    Overall, I'm not that impressed by the new Blogger. There are some things that look like they might be interesting (if unnecessary), some things that definitely seemed better in the old version, but for the most part it seems pretty much the same. I've only been playing around with it for a few minutes, but I'm not sure yet if maybe I'd have been better off sticking with the old.

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  9. It still asks for word verification -- which I assume it's still possible to turn off, though I haven't checked -- but not when replying to a comment on your own blog. Which is very nice for me, even if it doesn't do much for anybody else. :)

    It does mostly seem pretty much the same, which I actually find reassuring, but I definitely regard it as worth having upgraded just to do away with that absolutely abysmal old spellchecker. And it does seem to publish much faster.

    I've only encountered one thing so far that I really don't like, which is that when you use the "New Post" feature in the toolbar, it produces a badly formatted post with lots of hard returns. Which is a great pity, as that seemed like an extremely convenient feature, but I'm not going to use it as long as it does that.

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