By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Blogger blues

I was just about ready to switch Media Nation from Blogger.com to WordPress when I got a message last night saying that I could transfer to the new, improved Blogger. Well, I tried this morning and was informed that it’s still in beta; I can’t join in the fun because my blog is too large.

I’ve been using Blogger since 2002, and have found it easy but consistently frustrating, mainly because it’s down quite a bit. It also hasn’t kept up with new features such as tags and comment verification. Google acquired Blogger a few years ago, but it hasn’t helped. However, the new Blogger is supposed to address a few of these shortcomings — especially reliability and tags. (I may have to go third-party for a better comment system.)

For the time being, I’ll stick with Blogger and hope that I’ll be allowed to upgrade soon — mainly because changing Media Nation’s address would be a huge pain.

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8 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    It may be possible to use what Blogger calls “labels” and others call tags, on the older version of Blogger. I saw that idea on the list of help topics online. But even with new beta version of Blogger, it keeps scrambling third-party code I tried to put on my blog, like say, a Google search box. So if you do switch, I will be watching how you do it.thanks for the interesting blog.

  2. Lisa

    ya really need to buy a domain name. Then whatever service you’re on, you just point the domain name you own to it. Your address never changes from the readers’ perspective as long as you remember to renew the domain name when it comes up for renewal. I’ve been hearing a lot of unhappy users of the new Blogger Beta, even if you could get in I’d wait. Oh, and porting your blog, even from Blogger to Blogger, is a really good way to lose everything. Back up!

  3. Dan Kennedy

    Lisa: There really aren’t any good domain names for Media Nation. I could use DanKennedy.net, I suppose — it’s kind of gone fallow. Question: How the heck do I back up a blog that’s on someone else’s server?

  4. Anonymous

    So I take it blogger doesn’t have a back up function? Advantage WordPress.Dude, seriously, make the switch to WP. You’ll never look back and your readers will appreciate it.BTW: I ported a friends blog from blogger to WP without incident. WP has very easy tools for that.

  5. MeTheSheeple

    Media-nation.net seems to be open, at least.

  6. SolShine7

    I’m new to blogging on Blogger beta and I haven’t had any problems yet. Is WordPress really that good??

  7. Anonymous

    Here’s a nasty little Blogger beta bug.If you write a comment then at submit time click on the option to log in via your new beta account, after you do so the body of your comment will disappear. Poof!I’ve been bitten by a similar bug elsewhere and saved the text before proceeding. But, ouch! Easy to forget and if you wrote a long comment, really irritating.I’d like to get off Blogger, but after rassling with computers all day, have little energy left over to do it at night too.

  8. Anonymous

    I made the swith from Blogger to BloggerBeta a couple of months ago. I created my Sports Blog using the new Blogger tools, but chose not to change anything on my original Web Blog. I’ve noticed that adding HTML and Java to the new Blogger is more difficult.I, along with Michael Goldberg, also had trouble adding a Google Search Box to my Sports Blog. All I did was copy the code used on my Web Blog (where the code works perfectly fine) but the new Blogger isn’t reading it correctly. I couldn’t figure out the problem and gave up. However, all the other codes are working fine.In the end, the new Blogger isn’t so bad. It makes it very easy to change your layout. But if you have a very customized blog, the new blogger probably isn’t best!~A.J.

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