Holy Crap! That’s Blogger?
Wow. Blogger just got a serious, serious makeover. Pretty new design. Sensible new design. Comments. By Ghu’s horny left toenail, Blogger-provided comments. Author profile pages. Individual entry archives. Template tags that know whether you’re on the main page or an archive. Comments. Did I mention comments? Have you been around me long enough to know what that means? Comments! Blogger. Comments.
There’s still bits of packing material stuck to it here and there, since they seem to have just unwrapped it a couple of hours ago, but still… Blogger! Who knew they still had it in them? New templates by actual rock-star designers. Email to blog. Comments!
its amazing isnt it! i dont know about you but im doing some serious *messing* with my old blogger blogs. after google bought blogger ive just been waiting for comments. i wonder if google will do anything cool with the comment system considering there should be a HUGE database. google tends to do magical things with large amounts of data.
also something i noticed: the gmail invites are gone
No they aren’t. I signed up way back when but i’ve been getting the evites all of the time on the dashboard. On the righthand side..i promise :P
not 100% certain, but it appears that non-pro blogs also have another option for site feed, which should shut someone up.
I don’t think so: my pile of test blogs and various accounts has gotten very tangled, but I thought I looked at one owned by my non-pro user, and it was just a binary choice still.
And it is: ex-Pro is still (somewhat, ah, funky) RSS 1.0, Atom, or None, Free is still Atom or None.
…however if you check out the (newly quasi-comprehensive) help system regarding site feeds, it’s indeed more helpful (imagine that!). Now instead of simply ”Hey, you get an Atom feed” it gives a link to Feedburner for those of us who want to ’burn’ our feeds to another format, i.e. RSS 2.0. I gave it a whirl (as I’m a narcissist and wanted to subscribe to my own feed) and it seems to do a damn good job, too. Thumbs up to Blogger for that at least!
So, one of the most likely topics of conversation about the new Blogger, and the new comments (comments!) is going to be the TypeKeyness. A blog owner can choose to only allow comments from registered users (which means anyone with a Blogger account), from anyone at all, or only from other members of the blog, for a team blog. I’m afraid my first thought is so what? A TypeKey account is something new and strange and filled with possibilities for evil, but who doesn’t have a Blogger account that they’ve long since stopped worrying about?
Also interesting: I just went back to my comment on Ev’s blog, to get the permalink, and noticed a garbage can, offering to let me delete it. Interesting! I wonder if it’s time-limited, so I get a few minutes to think about it, or if I get to rewrite history whenever I choose?
Looks like the answer is, you can change your comment to This post has been removed by the author at any time. Or, for more than four hours, which amounts to the same thing with my memory.
Renovated Blogger
From other Blogger user reactions, I gather this was rolled out without warning. Perhaps it’s only open source weblog tool developers that actually pretend the users of the tool matter.
Personally, I liked the interface but the templates seem just like those of TypePad. Stepford pages. Still no biggie…until Zeldman. If Zeldman were here I’d kick him for his abysmal, incredibly sexist templates.
Nice, professional gray for Mr. Moto
Nice feminine _pink_ for Ms. Moto. And is that a barbie doll photo?
When is that man going to grow up? Or put away his bellbottoms and realize that yes, the revolution did happen?
Someone let me know when women in weblogging aren’t considered Barbie dolls, okay? Until then, I think I’ll go outside into the real world, where women can grow beyond some designer’s 2D view of us.
Pink. Indeed.
Yeah. I saw that, and was glad that nobody on the face of the earth wants my opinions about anything design related.
The open-source versus suprise thing? It may be more a matter of small-open-source versus everything else: try getting heard about Mozilla, or finding out what’s going to happen before it does. Or imagine opening up a discussion forum for Blogger’s, what, 50 million users?, to say what they want the site to look like. That’s why I’m looking at barriers to entry with a new eye lately: it’s not so bad, having something that doesn’t scale into the millions, and won’t be dead simple for absolutely anyone with zero knowledge to use.
Actually it’s more of a pinkish purple. #d7b, to be exact. And the Barbie doll isn’t part of the design, just part of the sample image.
Some women *like* pink and Barbie dolls. Hell, some *men* like pink and Barbie dolls.
That does it, I’m redesigning.
Then I would suggest that Blogger call the pink site, Mr. Moto, and the gray, Ms. Moto. Leaving the barbie doll photo as is, in the pink.
Or pink/purple.
This isn’t about that they picked pink — it was the associations between the sex of the title and the overall look. Notice in all of the other designs, that the pink wasn’t associated with a gender?
But please do redesign Mark. I’m sure that you’ll start a whole new meme and trend.
You know how sometimes you see a dog, mutt or working breed, whose owner really wanted to have a poodle or a kickme, so it has ribbons or a sweater and you can feel its pain at being dressed up when it really wants to be biting a mailman instead?
I don’t think I’m cut out for breaking this stereotype.
Wups, I need a doll, too. Anyone know where I can get a picture of a Rottweiler attacking a doll?
(And for those who inevitably won’t get it: I agree with Shelley that it’s a bad idea to label a gray template Mr. and a pink template with dolls Ms., and there’s nothing wrong with my gender equality chops: my very first exposure to politics was going to the state legislature to attend the ERA ratification hearings. I just think I’m funny when I’m trying to be funny about being serious.)
Maybe I can stand being pink, or purplish rose, or whatever this color is. I don’t actually think that my choice of background color is going to make any huge difference in anyone’s attitude, but… if there are people, men or women, who would actually like to use shades of pink in their design, but feel like they can’t because of the 12-year-old reader of Seventeen associations, and if my going pink for a while makes one feel like they can do what they want, not what people expect of them, I’m in.
>>If Zeldman were here I’d kick him for his abysmal, incredibly sexist templates.
Kick him? I would behead him. This is a crime against humanity. Obviously he must be a sexist and a terrible person. You should write about this on your blog.
Oh wait, you did.
Sorry, one last thing. I saw the site feed choice. Poorly documented, with a lot of emphasis on Atom, and nothing about which ”RSS” the RSS choice is. Help system is unimpressive and not that informative.
I can’t believe any major tool would not support RSS 1.0 (my biggest hit so far) and RSS 2.0 (my second biggest). Atom being cool or not, people want choice.
Bye Phil
Biggest hit how? I only look at what people link if they don’t support autodiscovery: have you been linking all three, somehow making them look evenly prioritized, with the same content in each, for long? I’ve often wondered what would happen if you could somehow force people to decide (which would require constant rotation of the first position, especially in autodiscovery, since lots of things will only pick up the first link element).
And don’t forget, you only see that choice if you are one of the few people who were using Pro back when it existed. Otherwise, you see ”Site feed: Yes/No.”
Unless you meant the link to FeedBurner down at the very bottom of the ”What is Atom?” page. I’m not so sure I object to that. If you have a religious preference for one format or another, it’s possible to choose (with a second centralized service piled on top of your first), if not, you aren’t bothered by the choice. I doubt that a string of icons for eleven or twelve different feeds, amusing though it can be, is doing much to popularize syndication.
And although I’d heard of FeedBurner, I hadn’t really looked at it before. If they really can do what they say, that could be interesting. The idea of providing user-agent specific versions of your feed (”Oh, it’s FeedDemon/1.0? They don’t know about Atom, I’ll give them RSS 2.0”), while risky sounding, could really kick ass, too.
What’s with all the redirects? On the page explaining the new Blogger, all external links (and, oddly, some internal ones as well) are redirected through Google. Same with extenal links mentioned in people’s comments (example here). What’s going on here? Is Google attempting to track clicks from the comments on all Blogger-powered blogs? Starting to track the trails on the way to building the Memex? Or is it just a comment spamming safeguard? That aside, the redirects are poorly done…they redirect to an actual page that loads in the browser before continuing to the final destination. Not exactly a seamless user experience. Yuck all the way around. Why can’t they just let the links be links?
I assumed it was taking them out of the PageRank equation: the Blogger main page has been redirecting external links for quite a while now. No Google-the-search-engine favoritism from a Google property? Then, since they had it, and it takes away the benefit from comment spamming (though it doesn’t actually stop the spammers from trying), they did it there too. Links from your name to a profile, rather than directly to your site. Hmmm. Have to see what you get if you don’t require registration.
In terms of the PageRank equation, those redirects transfer the PageRank from the linked sites to Google. Google’s PageRank will increase because of all those redirect links on sites with Blogger comments. How convenient.
Actually, there’s two different redirects at work: the ones on Blogger, that go through google.com/url, which return a
200with aLocation:header (and thus ought to transfer PR to Google, which I assume doesn’t count it’s own outbound ”link” as transferring it on), and the ones in the comments, which go through blogger.com/r, which returns a real302and thus doesn’t siphon off the PR, or halt its transfer in any way. Get to spamming, spammers! PR passes through their redirects!Looks like they changed the redirects since last night…at least in Ev’s comments. The links in the comments were going through ”google.com/url” when I was looking last night, but it’s since changed to ”blogger.com/r”.
Maybe, being Google themselves, they can just kill the PR through any of those links…
Yeah, the ”Keeping Comments Clean” help page says:
”Blogger has several built-in measures for dealing with comment spam and other associated dastardly behavior….
2. All links will be automagically redirected through the following URL, so they’ll receive no PageRank boost: http://blogger.com/redirect/?r=”
Yeah, Google will kill PR on any blogger.com/?r links, and other search engines will either be fooled by the spammers, or have to learn to ignore those redirects too.
Imagine if each blogging system did the same: well, they couldn’t, because they don’t have Google behind them. This could be considered a little monopoly abuse…
Ah. You get exactly nothing. ”posted by Anonymous”
If I were going to be using Blogger-comments, I’d sure want to have a link directly to the comment (or to somewhere else, where I could delete it) in the notification email. Nothing but a link to the blog’s front page is going to make detrolling and despamming a chore.
Blogger’04
The new Blogger.com is out, and it looks great, both visually and functionally. It’ll take a while to get used to not seeing the old…
Wow. I mean wow.
Google spends an undisclosed amount of money for Blogger, brings in its programmers, gives them free reign to muck around on their giant server farm FOR OVER A YEAR, and this is the best they can come up with?
If I had known that they were going to half-ass Blogger this badly, I would have started a competitor.
Don’t be so easy on yourself: while you are starting your competitor, be sure to also carry however many hundred million posts along with you. And keep publishing posts for hundreds of thousands of people while you build your better mousetrap.
New Blogger
Excellent new Blogger site has been released. Not only a better looking site, but many enhancements to the service, including: Post by email …
Blogger New
I am not complaining. Simple, non-cluttered and no fuss always works.
Very impressive, on a lot of levels. The templates are top-notch, much better than anything Typepad or WordPress or LiveJournal offers.
Though what remains to be seen is what happens when people who don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no HTML get turned loose on them. The tail end of my time doing Blogger support came around the start of switching to more semantic templates with more CSS. Made for some interesting threads with people who didn’t yet know that they wanted to know about block-level elements and what would silently close them and how that would affect inheritance.
Ah, the things that distract me when I should be doing something else. Now I’m thinking about what it would take to do bomb-proof HTML and CSS in a template. Probably do everything in
<div>s, so it couldn’t be broken by block-level stuff inside. Not sure what else you could do.That is because Blogger got really cool designers like Dave Shea to do their templates while WordPress had to settle for lesser talents like Dave Shea.
Maybe the WordPress guys should hold a contest.
Or maybe we should highlight a few of those styles on wordpress.org. Let me finish up finals and get 1.2 out the door first.
Bloody hell!
When I said yesterday on Smaller World that Blogger was having a redesign, I didn’t expect this.
That’s nice
Blogger re-designed the look and feel of their website. Now, isn’t that special. I can say, at least, that it isn’t as … orange … as it used to be….
In with the new hotness
In with the new hotness: Blogger relaunches, and they’re serving XHTML Strict, with Zeldman templates, commenting and profile pages and all sorts of goodies. Crumbs. Kottke notes on Ringnalda’s blog that: What’s with all the redirects? On the page expl…
It is interesting that Google have started offering comments, a feature that was previously not offered due to the sheer bandwidth / storeage / load intensiveness. Money talks it seems.
It will also be interesting to see how enetation and haloscan adapt.
Well, there’s the odd feature or two that remote systems offer but, to be realistic, they won’t be able survive Blogger offering its own system. Can’t see it, myself.
Some of those features, though… I didn’t actually notice the link that lets you export your comments from Blogger in CAIF. And I’m sure that not quite everyone will agree that ”either you have a Blogger account, or you’re nobody.”
Phil: Thanks for pointing out CAIF… I had somehow managed to completely miss it. If it included comment-level id and parent elements, I’d be in love.
An id attribute on comment elements sounds like a good idea that was missed. Parent attributes would’ve been on the cards when nesting is allowed, but progress has been slow (especially considering that the last version churned out was a year ago next week).
Marcus: If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. I’m all for an import/export format that is blissfully unburdened by the metaphorical boob flashing of Engineers Gone Wild.
Well, how can I argue with that example? Heh.
In saying that, I reckon it’ll be import that people’ll want from Blogger in the short term. Export is one of those things that a company would only do to be nice to users (and soon-to-be former users). Kinda funny, though, that all us remote systems have more accessible export than import systems so far.
Anyway, I’ve been poking through relevant Feedster searches and it seems that the whole Blogger account vs. anonymous thang is one of the biggest complaints.
While traffic (and signups) to remote commenting systems will undoubtedly decrease because of the Blogger/Blogspot integration of comments, survival will probably not be an issue for most commenting systems.
One, most commenting systems support and are used by thousands of people who are not from Blogger/Blogspot. In fact, some of the heaviest hitting users of Haloscan are not Blogger/Blogspot users.
Two, Blogger will always be behind IMO, in terms of features and flexibility, compared to third-party addon providers. A number of users have already expressed that they will continue to use HaloScan even after the launch of Blogger’s system and new Blogger/Blogspot users have continued to sign up even after knowing full well that Blogger has basic comment functionality now built-in.
As Rob already hinted, the continued growth of these 3rd party systems will be based more on how they evolve and compete in light of this development.
OT: What happened to your personal blog Marcus?
OK, maybe I was being a bit too negative… but I’m finding that a lot of users are simply switching - not because of the quality of Blogger’s system - but because its integrated. (The fact that it’s a new and shiny feature is probably a factor as well.)
I’d hazard a guess at most of BlogBack’s users being Blogger users, but I suppose there’s so many Blogger.com.br users that I kinda prove myself wrong.
…but yeah, we can be more competitive with commenting features because that’s our sole focus.
(As for my own wee blog, well, I just deleted it. Decided I couldn’t be arsed wasting time thinking of what to write when I always ending up writing nothing, and just pointing.)
since i’m not tech-savvy, blogger is handy, but the new incarnation w/comments built in is a pain! i’ve tried to replace the built-in bits with another service, but am afraid to commit because the preview of the change looks a little freaky. i didn’t switch because i wanted to; i switched because changing the template dumps all of my custom work :(
*sigh*
thanks for listening.
Celebrity Gardening
I visited the Urab Gardens show at Olympia this weekend.
Here are the direct links to the sample templates. These do *not* require a Blogger login to view.
Wow! The templates are really good. But why do you not set media=”screen” in ? So they don’t work on devices like printers or handhelds. Can you please support this devices too?
I mine media=”screen” in the style element.
I think it’s too little, too late. But time will tell…
Pretty templates do not an update make
As reported by Boing Boing and the BBC, Blogger has updated its s…
Damn Them
Damn the new Blogger templates for being so much more sexy than the design that I have fiddled with for months and years. Damn them!…
Blogger’04 metaRoundup
Some insider info: StopDesign, Evhead, Shellen, Biz. Feedback is pouring in: Metafilter, Haughey, PhilRingnalda….
Reaction to the New Blogger
…Hasn’t been too positive so far. I shall post a fairly random list of the reactions that I have come across. Diamond Geezer is fed up with the ”Bloody American Dates” and the fact that he ”can’t redraft a blog…
Reminds me too much of LiveJournal now, with the user profile pages and stuff, which means teenyboppers will start attacking it. Run and cover. But I kind of like it, even though it’s scarily like LJ, it seems simpler and more friendlier to people that have never blogged before.
Blogger: This darnfangled new thingamajog
Blogger just got a serious makeover: Holy Crap! That’s Blogger? I’ve been using it on and off since it first started, and now it’s finally become really spiffy. Even the default templates are really nice now, designed by bonafide rock…
Blogger Relaunches
The new Blogger is here. And though I may be a big fan of TypePad, I must give much love to Blogger for their hard work. The new features are great, the interface is much improved, and those new
Looks pretty nice… I use typepad now and I still think its better but for a free service this is pretty sweet!
Nuevo diseño en Blogger
Veamos. Update: tiene nuevas funciones, que todavía no revisé. Nuevos templates, diseñados por monstruos como Douglas Bowman, Jeffrey Zeldman, David…
Blogger Refresh
phil ringnalda dot com: Holy Crap! That’s Blogger?. Wow, blogger gets a big refresh. Google hasn’t been asleep. Something to track and try….
Hmm - issues with new Blogger update (not that I don’t love it)
1. I don’t like going ”Back to Dashboard” to switch between the blogs I’m editing, when previously there was that neat little drop-down menu in the top right. Randomly, is a dashboard the right metaphor to use in any case?
2. There doesn’t seem to be a way to enable the new comments feature on old posts other than going through them one by one. Grrr.
3. I know Blogger seems to want to remove archive indices, but I like them. But under the Template tab, Blogger wouldn’t even give me the option to edit the archive index file on some of my blogs. Lord knows why this was happening (but then I’m no great shakes on the Blogger-tech front). My kluge for this was to add ”index” after ”template_edit” in the URL for editing the main template, so http://www.blogger.com/app/template_edit.pyra?blogID=xxxxxxx became http://www.blogger.com/app/template_editindex.pyra?blogID=xxxxxxx
Which popped up a blank template for an archive index. Nice.
Blogger gets Comments
Thanks to Phil Ringnalda, I found out about Blogger’s new look and feel, including the addition of comments. I have old Blogger accounts, and first thing I did was pick one of the templates, and re-build my Blogger pages.
The user interface for…
Cool, Zeldman gives you template for your stamp collecting blog.
Blogging
Der Blog-Dienst Blogger.com zeigt sich seit heute im neuen Gewand. Designer Größen wie Douglas Bowman, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dave Shea und Dan Cederholm waren im Designprozess involviert. Auf Stopdesign beschreibt Bowman Einzelheiten des Redesign…
YAP-O-ROB
This is just Yet Another Post On the Relaunch Of Blogger. The entire blogosphere has been flooded with this in the past two days. I thought it would be nice to throw in my experience too….
Is conservative ”brown” a proper color for the otherwise futuristic blogger movement? I doubt it. I find the new Blogger interface to be a ”deprovement” rather than an ”improvement” both in terms of its hideous briefcase library design and its impractical usage. Who in gods name wants to use tabs? It takes more time to do almost everything because of the ceaseless unnecessary clicking now required from page to page rather than having the ”one page does it all” format of the original Blogger. For example, to get back to the inappropriately named ”Dashboard” you have move your mouse clear up to a distant link placed way up in the right hand corner of the page. Ridiculous! It is an interface for beginners. It is hard to believe this botched job was designed by professionals.
My further comments to the new Blogger interface as well as Blogger Support’s answer to my critique are found at http://www.lawpundit.com/blog/lawpundit.htm
I personally have nothing against those who want to use the new interface, but what bothers me about Blogger Support’s answer - symptomatic of internet companies these days - is that what some users want is simply ignored.
What counts for me on the blogger posting interface is SPEED, EFFICIENCY and SIMPLICITY. The Old Blogger interface had it, the new one has NONE of that, in spite of all the big names who allegedly worked on this update to the contrary.
Here are three cheers for the old Pyra programmers.
WONDERING:
Can a blog be made more discussion-friendly by
(1) having Comments sections read from MOST recent to oldest, instead of the other way around? So that
(a) people don’t have to read ALL the comments over and over again chronologically before getting to the new ones?
(b)people can see ”New” comments FIRST?
(2) having a way to inform readers that there ARE new comments to read?
I would like to start a blog that is an Active discussion, more like a message board, really, but with the ”cache’” of a blog. If you see my point.
Does anyone know a way of doing that? thanks. I find it odd and perhaps significant in some way I don’t understand that the ”hot” thing has gone from message boards (which are now ”icky”, BUT have a really communal, egalitarian feel) to blogs, which feel more sophisticated but are really, in their ”log”-ishness, more like islands of narcissism!
thanks.
Liz Margoshes,Ph.D.
Psychologist
On usenet since 1990,
echonyc.com host since 1991.
Liz,
1. New comments first only works if you are visiting a comment thread twice. The first time I read a post and click that comment link I want to see what other people have been saying.
2. Cookies, Javascript and HaloScan for comments - probably possibly in MT as well. I’ve implemented this on my site.
Your final point… is this very post/comment thread what you are looking for?
I can’t seem to find any template that would suit our site. :(
1.) How do I add my own gradient background into a template (similar to the ”thisaway” background done in orange)?
2.) How do I change the colors of the various boxes in the No. 897 or No. 565 design templates? Also can I make those gradient backgrounds??
it’s always the same thingz !!!!
[...] Doug recruited some terrific designers to design and style brand new, standards-based templates for the relaunch (in addition to the fine templates he contributed), and I was honored to be one of this select group: Dan Cederholm, Todd Dominey, Dave Shea and Jeffrey Zeldman all created some fantastic designs for the new templates (view a list of all the template designs). [...]