Google has rolled out a whole slew of new features for Blogger, the company’s user-friendly blogging software. In order to enable the new goodies, you’ll need to login to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com. This is where Google rolls out tools that might not be quite ready for prime time. But once you try out the new version, you’ll probably never want to go back.
First up, Google has redesigned the post editor. It’s still a what you see is what you get editor, but the toolbar looks much cleaner and placing images got about a thousand times easier thanks to a new drag and drop image handling. You can also easily resize images by clicking (or double-clicking in Firefox 3) to bring up a box that asks if you’d like an image to be small, medium or large.
Blogger in Draft also has better support for HTML and enables tables and other advanced HTML code to be placed in a post. And the preview feature brings up a new window so you can preview your post without leaving the editor window.
One thing to note is that Google has turned off the autosave feature, so you’ll need to click the save button periodically if you don’t want to lose your work. Autosave should be restored in a future update.
Google has also added the ability to import and export blogs as XML files. This makes it easy to change your blog’s URL without losing any data.
You can also finally allow users to leave comments without leaving your site. There are three options in the comments settings. You can have the old fashioned full page comments, pop up comment boxes, or embedded comments that will show up without leaving the current page. Note that embedded comments might not work if you’ve altered your template in any way. In our tests, the pop up comments worked just fine, but since we’ve kind of pimped out our Blogspot blogs, the embedded comments were a no go.
Finally, there’s a new star rating feature that lets visitors rate each post. Again, this feature may not work if you’ve messed with your Blogger template. There are a few more subtle changes, including the ability to make Blogger in Draft your default Blogger homepage. While Blogger still doesn’t offer the flexibility that competitors like WordPress do, these latest updates do make the service a bit more attractive.