Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Upgraded to Blogger Beta...might be a mistake

When I logged into Blogger this morning, I saw the link to upgrade my blog to the new Blogger Beta. I have been a Beta junkie for a long time, so I took the plunge with Blogger. First the good news, Blogger Beta is a lot faster than the last Blogger release, so less annoyance with posting/publishing cycles. Labels (I call them Tags on the actual posts) are finally available, something I wish had been here all along, but I guess I am going to have to edit 2 years worth of post to get this meta-data in, I am anal like that. Overall though, upgrading might have been a slight mistake. First, you have to link your previous Blogger account to a Google account. I choose my Gmail account, and I should have known better, now any Blogger related mail is going to Gmail instead of my main email address. You can't seem to control this, since it's a GMail Google account, I can't change where mail is sent, I guess I could remove GMail as a service from my account, but I should have used my non-GMail Google account. The new Layout Editor is pretty nice, it does most of what you would want to do with rearranging page elements and putting a GUI on editing the CSS and HTML. But I can't edit the actual HTML, that isn't working yet, so I can't replace the default header image with the one I recently created, lame. The JavaScript code for AdSense isn't working in the HTML/JavaScript page element that comes with the layout editor. Not a huge deal, I am not raking in the money with the Ads, but still another annoyance. The other think I did to the base template was remove the border around images I put in the posts, and I can't do that yet so like on my last post has a border around the image. The biggest disappointment by far is that the templates are still designing for 800x600. I hate his, maybe before I do any customization I need to run through all the templates and see if any are optimized for at least 1024x768. I started trying to change the old template to make it work on 1024x768, but I would have had to customize a lot of images and I thought Blogger Beta might have had some options with regard to template size...*sigh*