Meet the New Blog, Again

Yesterday seemed like a good day to throw caution to the wind and do the rest of the blog-upgrade chores I'd been putting off for fear of losing everything, and having to then essentially start over from scratch. As it turns out, I needn't have worried; with the exception of a couple minor HTML insertions in the template, it was mostly a drag-and-drop, button pushing operation.

Aside from the colors and associated layout changes, one of the upgrades is that natty topic index over there on the right. In conjunction with the new labels capability, this ought to make navigation much easier. The archive remains fundamentally the same, with the exception of those post-count numbers. There are other ways to display the archive now, too, but I think this method will work for the present; there really aren't enough posts at this point to make the other options particularly interesting.

You've probably noticed the absence of the previous posts list, but at the bottom of the currently displayed posts is an easy way to continue reading the previous stuff, so no loss there. I'm still keeping posts displayed on the main page to a minimum, since not everyone has a fast connection. The addition of the Atom subscription link—also at the bottom—is another positive change. The new version of Blogger makes it exceptionally easy to add various types of page elements, so things like favorites-lists and possibly even content from external sources may appear at some point.

Sometimes change only creates the illusion of improvement, but to me, the whole thing looks better. It may be my imagination, but the line spacing appears to have increased a bit; it just seems easier to read now. Other improvements aren't as apparent, as I mentioned last week when I made the initial jump to the new version of Blogger. Evidently, the previous version had been around for some years and was straining under the load. But the more modern methods used in the new version—e.g. serving database content as needed, instead of republishing the entire blog each time it changes—result in a faster response, on my end as well as yours.

There are security enhancements, too, although that probably isn't a concern to readers. Still, I think it's interesting that Google's blogging platform incorporates better security than some of the others that aren't free, or that perhaps require some sort of involvement with advertisements or similarly irritating things. But then, anyone who's used Google's equally free e-mail product already knows something about their position on security matters.

In any event, if you happen to notice a glitch or otherwise spot something amiss—or maybe just something in need of improvement—I hope you'll let me know. And those of you using the old version of Blogger: unless you've made a lot of changes to your template, the move to Blogger-in-beta really doesn't take all that much time and effort. Really.