As presaged by Kirk, Blogger have finally officially announced the demise of Old Blogger.
Blogger Buzz was the last blog to move over to to the shiny feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta - which it did on 26 April, with a DNS change to point the www. at New Blogger (which used to be only at www2) on 27 April, and the "physical dismantling" of Old Blogger yesterday, 4 May - the date of the Buzz announcement.
I'd finally switched over myself pretty late, back in March (some tips on things to tweak after migrating to New Blogger). Luckily the www2 still works, for now, as after the move I'd had to change some of my manual template links to www2 to get them to work, and I haven't changed them back to www yet - I'll do that the next time I do a template update, and it's probably best to if you have the chance, in case they take away the www2 at some point now it's no longer needed.
Most of the stuff on New Blogger, now of course the one and only Blogger, is whizzy and improved - if harder to get one's mind round, in the case of the new widgety templates and tags. Many of us mourn the loss of comment editing (though it's right that they closed that loophole), but I do hope that Team Blogger will now be able to devote more time to fixing other stuff like doing more to fight comment spam, and sorting out the unresizable window for comments popups, or the inflation of uploaded GIF and PNG files.
One area of mystery to me though is how to search Blogger member profiles for interests, movies etc. Once upon a time you could do that, I figured out a way to find out e.g. who's put down "tea" as an interest, or which Blogger members list the Shawshank Redemption as one of their favorite movies, and with help from Kirk and Michael Bates even how to locate Blogger users by geographical location. Well, the form for searching interests, music etc (still in my blog sidebar for now) has now stopped working. I guess they turned the lights out on that too.
A while back in the days when you actually got email replies from Blogger Support, they told me they were planning to roll out their own method of profile searching. Maybe I missed it, but I've not been able to find one yet. The Google Blog Search operators don't allow anything like that. I wonder if they're going to roll out another way to search Blogger user profiles (which was fun to do if you had an idle moment - see if anyone living near you shared an interest in Morris dancing etc). But I suspect it may be RIP for Blogger profile searching too.
And now let's share a 2-minute silence (yet again, but officially this time!) for Old Blogger - it served many of us very well.
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4 comments:
Those of us who host our Blogger blogs on our own domain and web space are still relegated to a kind of limbo. My account has been migrated to "New" Blogger, but I don't get to use the new layout tools and such...
Still, I'm overall very happy with what I've got right now.
Thanks Rob, hmm that's interesting - you don't get the Customise Design link in your Template tab then?
I do - though I don't host elsewhere, I've got a heavily customised template and the "old" Blogger template still. Haven't taken the plunge to upgrade to Layouts yet on this blog, though I plan to soon, in a movable month..
FTP blogs will most likely never get the Layouts templates...or if ever it will be awhile. Technically more difficult than it's worth I suspect
FTP and Layouts
Ah cool, Kirk, thanks for the link, I definitely missed that.
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