The other day I went into my Blogger.com-hosted WernerPatels.ca (where I mirror my web column for backup purposes), and discovered the “new” Blogger.
Its new editor now allows for jumps, i.e. “Read more”, which you can use to shorten an entry on the main blog page. Unfortunately, though, Blogger has done away with the “<p>” tag, which means that all paragraphs are now instead separated by line breaks (“<br/>”), which increases the spacing between paragraph considerably. It doesn’t always look pretty.
There’s a way around it, however, when you write and publish your posts from an external application, like Live Writer. But once you go into the Blogger editor to make changes to an existing post, all bets are off, and you’ll be trapped in line-break hell.
The other thing I like is that images uploaded to your blog are now hosted on Google’s Picasa, which gives you 1GB of storage. It also adds new tools, like adding frames or shadows to your images, which wasn’t possible before when images embedded in blog posts were hosted on a separate Blogger.com server. Also, with Picasa, you can now go in and manage the stock of images, even delete some you no longer need (e.g., because the blog post in question no longer exists). When images were hosted on Blogger.com, users had no control over the images and were unable to delete previously uploaded images even after the post had been deleted, thus reducing the available storage space.
Finally, with Blogger.com you can now create pages and place them in a navigation bar (not unlike those found with WordPress or Typepad).
In short, the new and improved Blogger.com really is much better now. All Google has to do now is fix the issue of line breaks. (Why don’t they simply reactivate the paragraph coding and tags?)
