The new Blogger

4 months ago, Blogger revamped Blogger, called it Blogger Beta and released it to an exclusive few. What it offered was:

1. WYSIWYG editing of templates
2. Common Google account, as opposed to using a separate Blogger account
3. No need to 'republish' the whole blog with every edit - pages are rendered realtime
4. More syndication (feeds) options
5. Ability to tag your posts with metatags, Wordpress-style

Now that they're rolling it out to the rest of Blogger users, I decided to migrate over, seeing how it's so well received.

How do you move over? You go to the Dashboard, i.e. the index page of www.blogger.com after you login. Then click on the option to switch over. You then enter your Google account details, leave, then wait for them to send you an email to state that the conversion process is over.

First impressions: Hardly any change from the old Blogger. The Dashboard looked different, but otherwise the editing user interface stayed largely the same, which is a Good Thing.

However, to unleash the full power of the new Blogger, I had to use a new template, as the old one didn't work with the WYSIWYG template editor. That was the hard part. A Google search revealed that there were extremely few new-Blogger-compatible third party templates, so I just had to use one of the Blogger-provided templates and get down and dirty with the HTML.

The hardest part was to change the width of my blog. As I have a number of 640x480 photos, they could not fit into the standard templates provided. With LOADS of trial and error, I finally got it to do what I want.

Then I transferred over the old background from my older template, and tweaked the colour scheme to suit that. Removed the ugly borders from the photos, made small adjustments to margins and all such that it'd be tight and compact.

THe WYSIWYG template editor rocks. Now it's so much easier to add links to your friends' blogs without having to type all that silly HTML. However, the new lists uses 1.5-line spacing for the links in the sidebar, which I'm totally not happy with. Up to now I still can't find a way to fix that.

Another problem with the template was that I had to modify the HTML and stuff to allow links that have been visited before to be shown in a different colour. Pretty disappointed that the original template didn't cater for something so basic. Fixed the problem of the post-footer not being rendered with the correct stylesheet too.

In the end, fussy users like me still have to delve into the realm of HTML and CSS despite the new Blogger. But I guess it's worth it, for the improved syndication options and not having to hit 'republish' all the time.

I'm not too happy of that little 2-3 pixel gap between the Navbar and the title header when the page is viewed in Firefox too. Somehow, it renders perfectly in IE. I can't find a way to fix it, even despite lotsa OCD-esque fiddling.

I'm quite particular about my templates. Everything has to be pixel-perfect, rendered perfectly in both IE and Firefox. I spend hours tweaking it such that the size ofthe margins are, to my eyes, perfect within the closest 5 pixels.

Experimented with opacity settings within the style sheets but failed miserably. I guess that's the reason we hardly see transparency effects using plain HTML/CSS?

Found a nifty way to keep track of the comments in the blog by putting the address of the comment-feed into my feed reader, SharpReader. Saves the time checking the comments page of every entry every now and then.

After all that effort, I guess the new Blogger works out quite alright for me eh?

Oh and I've removed the Blogpatrol counter for now. I suspect it's the cause of the popups on my blog.