New Blogger transition

We got the royal summons a few days ago - change over to the New Blogger or you won't be able to log-in again until you do so!

So we did - and it was very painless. The email notification to say that all had been done arrived within 5 minutes.

I've been playing with the new features for a couple of days now, and here are some observations.

I like:
- that my existing template did not get screwed up
- that Publishing and Republishing is a thing of the past - no more rotating triangles as the cogs whirr and the gears click and then sometimes jam!
- that the blogsite is now faster to load
- when composing posts, image loading is much quicker too
- the labels/categories/tags feature

I don't like:
- that I can't use my chosen html template from Caz with a lot of the new features. I would have to change over to one of the existing Blogger templates that have already been modified to take advantage of features such as label lists/clouds and the Layout page elements editing and composing
- in our profile, it now abbreviates UAE to AE, so I've now erased the <$BlogOwnerLocation$> code from my template and manually entered United Arab Emirates into my location - call me picky!

I wish that:
- the Blogger developers had made the Post Composer window bigger as it's annoyingly small when I use it to upload images into my posts
- images didn't always load at the top of the compose window and would load where the cursor was positioned within the compose window
- the action "New Label" in the "Label Actions" drop down menu would be at the top of the window and not at the bottom, so I don't have to scroll down to the end of my labels list to create a new label


To elaborate more on the template features:

New Blogger templates are written in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code to take advantage of features like Page Elements and Fonts and Colours when editing the template layout.

Just as I had come to terms with basic html adjustments, I am now attempting to learn CSS!

With CSS, coding for elements on the template page is written within "containers" which means there are different containers for page elements like the Blog Post Body, the Blog Owner Profile, the Blog Heading, Categories, Archives etc. This allows for easy editing and customisation of the template in the "Adding and Arrange Page Elements" window under the Templates heading in your Blogger Blog interface.

For basic html-user people like me, it's a little nightmare! For instance, no longer can I use code like within the CSS containers to create a space between my Post Title and the Post Body - I now have to add "bottom padding" to the Post Title code. I have enough bottom padding of my own without having to add more!

Anyway, it's a challenge, and I am having fun learning new stuff. I've created a test blogsite where I'm playing with new templates.

I'm hankering after a 3-column template because of the desire to add a labels list/cloud, and found a couple of websites that offer 3 column templates - Hoctro's Place and Hackosphere. I've now loaded one of Hoctro's designs and am using it to learn how to change it to my liking.

I'm also happy to read that Caz is also looking at the New Blogger to hopefully design some templates as I really like her styles.

Sites that I'm finding helpful are:
- Hoctro's Place
- Blogger Hacks
- Testing Blogger Beta
- Beta Blogger for Dummies
- Known issues for the New Blogger

If you know of any others, please post them in the Comments section.