Bad-Ass Blogger Beta

Thanks to Akshay, who responded to my comment on his blog and told me that Blogger Beta is now open to everyone who wants to switch. The three coolest things in my opinion are:

• Tags for posts, so you can categorize your posts and let readers browse by category rather than just by time. If people like my posts about France, they can just click "France" in the Topics section to the right. That is, once I finish labeling all of my old posts (complaint number one and only: wish I could mass-label my posts -- am I missing something?).


• Drag-and-drop layout editing, with prefab containers for lists, external javascript, etc. It was a very small pain to migrate all of my sidebar widgets (the wine journal, del.icio.us tag cloud, flickr badge, blogroll) and will now be much easier to add them in the future. The best part is that that kind of stuff is now more easily accessible to people without a degree from MIT in computer science.


• Faster. At least, publishing is faster (because rendering is dynamic), so blogging is easier. I've yet to see if regular page loads are any slower due to being dynamic, but it certainly doesn't seem so as of yet.

Everyone thank Akshay for making this sweet new toy, especially since he has to stay up at night with a pager in case it breaks.