Radical Improvement of Blogger

I realize that this post might be tempting fate (but I don't believe in that anyway, so I'll post away) but I must say that I am impressed with the radical improvement in Blogger over the last few weeks. Because my blog's archive is so massive, Blogger would not let me join the new, once Beta Blogger for some time, but finally it allowed me in, and now everyone has to be in and the old Blogger has been formally retired. It was a regular complaint among bloggers on Blogger that it was unreliable, that posts wouldn't post, that it would go down, that one would lose posts in progress. But all has been going swimmingly now for some time. In particular, I am happy with the way that Blogger is FTPing to my own server, at ntgateway.com, because this used to be one of the slowest elements in the whole business. And what with labels and all too, and the integration with Google for us Googleholics, it's becoming a technically pleasurable experience to blog with Blogger. I am pleased I stuck with it in those unhappy earlier days.

Switch to the new blogger and thoughts on Google Reader

If you had dozens of posts from this blog appear in your reader this morning, it is because I've just made the switch to the new blogger. I tried to switch a month or two ago but it wouldn't let me because my archive was too massive, and hosted off-site. But now it's allowing me to make the switch and I have done so. One of the features of the new blogger is that it enables labels, at last, so they will be a feature from now on. I will not, however, be adding labels retrospectively to old posts, though, not least since there are well over 2,000 of them.

I am also experimenting with the new Google Reader and I am enjoying it a good deal and it is on the road to persuading me to abandon Bloglines, especially as it turned out to be very easy to export all my feeds from Bloglines to Google. And there are features about Google Reader I like, especially the starring of posts, à la GMail. Since I am a fan of Google applications, and use dozens of them (e.g. Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets, Notebook), it is probably just a matter of time before I switch fully to Google Reader too. The one thing that is holding me back is that Bloglines renders my blogroll here on this blog very well. As far as I can tell, Google Reader does not have quite the same facility, though it does produce other nice features like clips from my blogroll, which is a lot of fun.