Finally Getting Around to Tweaking Blogger

Hi all. Guess you've noticed that things are a little different here. In its recent upgrade, Blogger added a lot of new features that I just haven't had time to take advantage of, but I did get to hack at it a little bit today.

First thing that you will notice is a new template. This one seems to go with the library style sheet a little bit better, and it's available for free through Blogger. So, no coding for me! Yay! Now, in order to convert to it, we did lose a bit of our sidebar content, but I'm not sure how much we were using that anyway. The RSS feeds section went away, but there's a link to an Atom feed at the bottom, which should work fine in most major feed readers.

Is anyone particularly attached to the "Library Blogs" section? I'd like to build it up a bit or get rid of it altogether. Please let me know how you feel about that, and if you'd like to add anything else in the sidebar.

Next, we now have the ability to tag our posts! Blogger calls them "labels" for some reason, but they act like tags. When you are editing a post, you will see a field in the lower right called "Labels for this post." Just type your tags in there, separated by commas. I've gone back and tagged the last few months worth of posts, and will try to tag it back to the beginning eventually. If you click the "Show all" link next to the right of the "Labels for this post" field, you will see the tags that I've already used. Click on the ones you like and they'll appear in the field, no typing. I recommend doing this, so we can class like posts somewhat together.

I can add a category list in the sidebar, and put links to the most used tags, if you all want. However, you can also just click on a tag in any post and see all the posts that share that tags.

I'll try to keep an eye on the new posts, and tag the ones that need it. So, if you don't like tagging, or just don't want to do it, no worries. I'll take care of it for you.

So, tell me how you feel about all this new blogginess, by email or in the comments.