Blogger Beta

Blogger Beta: Drag and drop your page elements wherever you want... in theory!

If you are creating a new Blogger account, you'll now be creating it with the new "Blogger Beta".

Setting a blog up with Blogger Beta is virtually unchanged [how to set up a blog on the "old" Blogger], but once you've got it up and running, adding things like lists of links are a lot more intuitive, as you can "drag and drop" them, rather than having to edit the code.

In the image above, for example, you can see me dragging my "links" section, which I want to appear above the "+info" section of my page.

One other big advantage of Blogger Beta is that it means that you can add "labels" (aka categories) to your posts -- which means that your user can then navigate the posts labelled (for example) "blogging" or "grammar", or whatever other labels you want to give them.

So far, the only real problem I've come across is that it seems a lot harder to do things if you want to be able to create a truly personal design (not something you want to attempt anyway if you are starting out in blogging).

The Blogger Beta "help" file is not quite as comprehensive as the old one. Partly that's because up front, things got simpler -- but get down under the hood, and it's more complex.

As a geek, wanting to get my hands dirty, I'm glad I came across Blogger Beta for Dummies, which is very useful in explaining how to do things if you really want to know.

The Google Groups for Blogger are somewhere else you could turn to for help.