They certainly added some interesting features as described in The Great Blogger Relaunch
My personal favorites are:
Built-in comments I still like Haloscan but I think I may experiment with Blogger’s commenting. Blogger’s system give you the ability to limit commenting to registered Blogger users, or allow anyone to commment, or only allow team members (for group blogging) to comment. The do not have trackback and to transition from Haloscan to Blogger’s comments would mean losing all my past comments. I think I may experiment with the new features in a new blog and then decide how to more forward. This feature certainly changes my pet project of writing a commenting system.
Post Page Archiving This is cool. Every post now ends up as its own page if you turn this on. So instead of using a permalink (which makes the entire archive load and waits until after the load before jumping down the page) you can now have every post with its own url. I’m a little torn on this one because it reads as if it will read like a Xanga post where you are looking at the one post and its comments but don’t have a clear way to return to the surrounding posts for the full story. Fortunately Blogger thought of this and has added Conditional Tags so that if you are on an archive page it gives you a quick way to return to the main blog.
And Posting by email In what looks like a system borrowed from Phlog Blogger now allows posts from email. If your email, such as a cellphone, tags an advertisement or other text to the end you can tell blogger when to stop by putting #end into your message. Blogger does not support picture attachments yet so I don’t think we can combine Phlog and Blogger quite yet but I bet it comes soon.
Judgment still out:
Profile Tags These allow you to use a tag like <$BlogOwnerLastName$> to show your last name. The benefit of course being that if your last name ever changes you can make that change in your settings and the change will be reflected in all your psots. These don’t really excite me.
There is still much to experiment with and learn to use. Good job Blogger!
