The New Blogger: Still Buggy after all this time!
I’ve been wasting my time fiddling around with the New Blogger and needless to say I’m disappointed. It’s still not up to code yet (no pun intended) for at least three reasons:
1. I’ve been stymied by a bug that was first reported by Phydeaux3. As a result I can’t create my post pages. Post pages are a very important part of a blog site and so there is no point in my continuing this exercise until Blogger gets its shite together.
The problem is the New Blogger doesn’t support the wonderful conditional tag “ItemPage” that it used to offer. Instead they use a “pageType” attribute which for some unknown reason gets stripped from the code every time you try to save the template (with no error message or explanation either).
2. There have been horror stories abound about the new Custom Domain Names feature. So far I have been able to get it half working — i.e. it works with the prefix “www”, but NOT without it. In other words, if you keyed in the URL Bloke Report (my test page), it works fine. But if you tried BlokeReport (sans the “www”) you would get an error message. Hrrrumph!
3. And another strange thing happened to me on the way to the market. For some reason my favicon disappears after switching to Custom Domains. So what’s up with that huh?
I’m sure there are other reasons that I could think of if I had the inclination, but these are reasons enough that I’m contemplating putting a halt to my plans to switch over to the New Blogger (for now). It’s obvious they still have some work to do before the New Blogger will be up to my expectations.
Filed under: blog bloke, instabloke, blog, blog tips, blogging, blog tools, web 2.0, new blogger
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Well, keep in mind what I was talking about was only in one circumstance, the pageType doesn’t appear to work as an ‘attribute for a widget’.
The pageType DOES work in conditional tags everywhere else (Every template uses them off the shelf), and can be used in many places successfully. Just per widget is the problem area.
Thanks for the clarification phydeaux3, but I think I’ll wait if it’s all the same. They can continue beta testing at someone else’s expense, not mine. Clearly they haven’t got it right yet and I don’t need the hassle…widget, widget…
So you have the problem with the www. prefix or not too? What is the deal with this? I was using wordpress.com before with domain mapping (I’m a beta tester), but I have become so frustrated with the limitations of wordpress.com, that I decided to give Blogger another chance.
You’re right, the new Blogger is buggy, but I would expect this since it is new. Hopefully these issues will get worked out. God forbid I end up going back to wordpress.com. You know they make you pay for just about every feature that Blogger tends to offer for free (custom css, domain mapping, etc)?
We’ll see what happens with this custom domain thing. I think it will be alright. Keep in mind that Google is huge, and it might take a minute or three to work out the bugs.
Lastly, one thought comes to mind: I wonder if Google will start providing domain names. Will this also be free? Perhaps with Google ads? Just a thought.
Last I heard they are charging $10 for a Custom Domain with Google Apps. But I would avoid using Google Apps right now. Too many problems.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: After several hours on the phone with the domain registrar I think I might have a fix for all of these problems. I just have to wait another 24 hours for it to propagate further to make sure. So stay tuned and I’ll keep y’all posted.