Last Tuesday, I said:

Just when I was starting to actually believe that Google had abandoned all development on Blogger, I noticed something that could possibly mean that they haven’t forgotten about their free blogging service after all...

On Friday, I suggested that Blogger was going to be migrating to Google Accounts. And today they’ve launched Blogger Beta!

As well as migrating Blogger to use Google Accounts, they’ve also (finally) added loads more features:

• Customize your template by dragging and dropping page elements; there are also new templates from which to choose).
• Create a private blog by editing your permissions to control who can view and contribute to your blog.
• Add category labels to your posts – at long last!
• More feed options are now available, including RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 (instead of just Atom 0.3) – and also feeds for your blog comments, even on a per-post basis!
• Updated Dashboard to check our blog’s activity and make managing your blog easier.
• Instant publishing whenever you make a change.

You can take the tour here.

(I wasn’t able to migrate my Blogger account to my Google Account, so I just created a new Blogger Beta account using my usual Google login.)

So, there we have it. After all this time, Google have finally made some changes to the Blogger service that everyone thought they’d forgetten about! Will it be enough? Of course not! Users always want more...

(One final thought – I wonder why they’ve named it “Blogger Beta” rather than “Blogger 2.0 Beta” instead. “Blogger Beta” indicates that it’s a predecessor to Blogger, which it obviously isn’t...)

[Thanks to Pierre S in the Google Blogoscoped Forum.]

Update: 14 August 2006 (21:35)

View this post on my Blogger Beta blog here, which nicely shows off some of the new features including a nice new format for the archive menu, which is fully customizable, although still very buggy!

Also, on closer inspection it appears that you can’t:

• publish to a non-Blog*Spot domain (at least for the time being)
• edit the templates by hand – “Raw template editing functionality coming soon.”

Labels: blogger, google

My interest was mildly piqued there for a moment, until I realised that there doesn't seem to be any way to migrate my blogger blogs to Google. What a load of cock!

Be patient. If you had read the info you would see that it is possible to migrate your current blogs to your new account when the beta period is over.

I cant ever log into my account or anything. What's up with that???