The most popular blogging website, Blogger, has just announced a new beta version of their service. It looks like developers have listened well and worked hard to please their bloggers. To help you learn new service features, there is a tour with highlights of the most interesting newly made improvements.
For the moment, only a limited number of existing blogger.com users can switch over to the new beta (you should see a link on your Blogger dashboard), but it is promised that eventually everyone will be able to enjoy the new version of the service. Everyone is invited to register a new beta account to try all the improvements out, and it's possible to use your existing Google account for logging in.
Some of the new features are:
- Improved dashboard
- Labels (categories) you can assign to each post
In the Posting dialogue, you have a text field for a comma-separated list of your labels. The default layout of your new blog will not have a list of labels, but you can easily change this by editing your blog template and adding a Labels page element. You can set the name of this page element to anything you like, and you will also have the option to sort your labels list alphabetically or by a number of posts with each label. - Private blog
You can now limit access to your blog, by closing it to the public access and inviting your friends by email. Each of them will get an invitation with a unique ID in the URL, so that they'll have an option of either viewing your blog in guest mode for up to 30 days, or to associate this invitation with their existing Google account. Obviously, there is an option of easily creating a Google account as well. - Better blog layout
It is possible now to drag-and-drop page elements in the layout editor, and generally it's much easier to customize your blog's template - Feeds support improved
RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 are both supported now, and there's more flexibility in controlling your feeds (you can have a separate feed for all your comments, or provide feeds for comments to each entry)
To learn more, please read the New Features section of the Blogger Help site.
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