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9 November 2006

Migrating to Blogger Beta

Back in August I posted about Blogger Beta being released. Yesterday, they finally announced that users with FTP-publishing blogs could migrate to the new system (using a Google Account) and benefit from some of the improved features.

I’ve just migrated my blog to use Blogger Beta and have discovered a few bugs / issues with it:

Previous Posts

When using the <BloggerPreviousItems> tag in your Blogger template to display previous posts on your individual item pages, this used to display a list of all the posts you made prior to the post that was on the current page. This meant that you could easily use this list of links to go back through your blog archive. This is no longer the case. Instead, it simply shows your 10 most recent posts. If you never re-publish your blog, this wouldn’t be such an issue, but they really shouldn’t have changed this functionality.

Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08)
The Blogger Team sez: We’re aware of the Previous Posts issue. I don’t have an ETA for when this will be fixed, though.

Encoding HTML entities

They are no longer encoding the ampersands in the links created by the <$BlogItemCreate$> template tag. For example, this:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12345678&postID=1234567890

will now appear as:

https://beta.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12345678&postID=1234567890

Which means any XHTML validation will obviously fail. And they’re still converting line breaks in comments as <BR/> instead of <br /> despite the settings page saying that “single hard-returns entered in the Post Editor will be replaced with single <br /> tags in your blog. [...] This also applies to the comment-posting form.”

Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08)
The Blogger Team sez: We did not know about the URL encoding; I’ll add that to our internal bugs tracking system. (We generally don’t report tiny stuff on the Known Issues blog.

Posting comments

Clicking the link to post a comment on a Blogger Beta blog now takes you to a page served over HTTPS instead of HTTP. This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, which means that Internet Explorer users get an annoying popup. (Who cares about those losers though, right?)

Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08)
The Blogger Team sez: I’m not familiar with the IE problem on posting comments. (I mean, I didn’t get a popup the last time I tried this.) Can you send the URL of an example page that gave you this alert? [Which I’ve done...]

There are probably loads of other issues that I haven’t even noticed yet but hopefully all the extra features and improvements will overshadow those though. I just hope that the Blogger team don’t let the development of any new features overshadow the need to fix any bugs...

Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08)
As you may have seen in my comments, Blogger Beta also seems to generate the blog feed differently. Instead of including the most recently created posts in the feed, it now includes the most recently updated posts. If you’re one of the people who subscribes to my feed and received a load of old posts in your feed reader yesterday, please accept my apologies; I was just taking advantage of one of the new Blogger Beta features and adding labels to all my old posts. (I’ve asked the Blogger Team whether that’s behaviour by design or a bug.)

Labels: blogger, google, ruscoe.net

3 Comments

9 November 2006 at 19:14 by  Anonymous  

9 November 2006 at 21:17 by  Tony Ruscoe  

25 November 2006 at 17:03 by  mdarkin