So I’m looking at all these great new features that are coming in the new Blogger and suddenly, theres not much point in keeping the blog hosted here at stevesramblings.com ;-)

Okay, thats not entirely true, but the majority of the really useful features will be only available to Blog*Spot hosted blogs, which is a little unfortunate. Then again, I guess its the only way they can avoid serious security issues I guess.

So of course I’ve created a test blog (I have so many blogs now, I’m starting to lose track of them) on the new beta system, and at the moment its still pretty marginal in what it can do as far as templating goes. You have to use one of the pre-existing templates for some of the newer features to be available at the moment.

However…. Labels/Tags work already, and also the new RSS/Atom feed changes are great. Feeds for comments in general, feeds for comments to specific posts, and then the feeds for the blog as a whole. Not a silly idea at all.

For me, the labels/tags are the biggest and longest awaited feature. In the past I’ve used a Greasemonkey script to add Technorati tags to the posts (although since moving to stevesramblings.com I’ve been lazy as hell with it) and this has worked nicely. However, in the new version of Blogger, I will be able to get rid of the Technorati tags entirely. Its built in now, and more importantly, you’ll be able to see posts that use the same tags quite easily. Closest I can think of this would be Categories in MT/WP, but much, much better. Its not structured such that you have to predefine them. Just type them in seperated by commas.

My existing blogs haven’t been invited to use the new blogger services, and to be honest, Im kinda happy with that for now. I doubt I’d make use of the new features anytime soon until they upgrade in a significant way the templating system. The default templates are ugly as hell (just browser blogspot to see what I mean) and they haven’t published the new template system info to allow people to create their own new ones for the new system.

One thing I do have to admit though, when its finished and its ready, I will be definitely using it as much as I can. That will probably mean returning this blog to kinthiri.blogspot.com with a redirect. We’ll see I guess. ;-)

However, the honest truth of the matter is that quite simply, the new feature set means that WordPress will never be a consideration for me in the future. Blogger is finally catching up, and surpassing.