Friday, October 13, 2006

Oh, BTW, I changed the layout and look of my blog.

And I am trying blogger beta; few things I have noticed:

I like this wider one, and it will resize no matter what resolution OR when you resize the actual browser window.
That is pretty nice. Good code on their part.
Also, they finally have optimized code for the pages for both IE and Firefox.
The other one most certainly had issues with both browsers at times.

You CANNOT edit the HTML of the page the same way you could before with the other version.
The stuff on the side are within widgets. You have to edit the widgets themselves.
Now, for me, that posed a problem for at least one thing, my blog links. When I switched to beta, it imported them into a widget. So far so good, but: I want all my links to open in new windows. There is no option for this.
I had to use their HTML choice for a widget and make the links myself with my own code.
Not that big a deal, but having the choice within the default would be nice.
When you create an HTML widget for the other stuff (my logos, links, banners, etc..) there still seems to be some kind of code error when you save it off. Then it saves it anyhow.
There are some nice new templates, many of them with different versions of basically the same one.

So far, my only complaint would be the way the widgets work and that they should give you an option to mess with the HTML of the side content OR use their new default.
Even though they are trying to make it easier for people to customize their pages without having to mess with the HTML code, one glaring thing about the widgets is that the content is in the other they put them in, so if you want to change that up, you will have to change the template HTML anyhow. There is a single closed line of HTML for each widget.

So, that is my report so far.
Peace, and have a great weekend.

4 comments:

LA said...

Thanks for the review, Mike. I've been curious about beta, and it's good to have some input now to consider.

Unknown said...

How were you able to import your past blog posts? I signed into beta and it made me start a new blog from scratch.

Mike V. said...

hmm, I didn't have to do anything, it brought them over for me.
maybe when you did it they had not got that far in the beta process?

Unknown said...

Maybe. I'm hoping that I can move over soon. The new features sound good. My site is in need of a drastic makeover.