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New Blogger June 2008 - The Post Editor

So for the first major overhaul to Blogger since December 2006 (aka "New Blogger 2006"), the Blogger interface has been updated with lots of shiny features. Currently, the new features are visible only in Draft Blogger.

The first change you will notice when you edit your post. In "Compose" mode, you get a shiny new toolbar - similar to what you'll see in GooglePages. Almost the same buttons, almost in the same order. The two attachment buttons - for Photo and Video - have been combined into one labeled "Image", and moved to the left. Full Justification is gone. And spell check is gone (no major loss there IMHO). But most others are there, and in the same left to right order.

The major change that you will see is in "Edit HTML" mode. The toolbar there is gone.

And it's the same crappy small editing window. The one change that we've been waiting for - still somewhere in the distance.

In Blogger In Draft: New Feature: New Post Editor, we see
... there are a handful of other features from the current post editor that are on our to-do list for the new editor. If you rely on any of these, you may not want to use the new editor for everything just yet.


Yet, there are improvements.
  • The well known vertical spacing problem, caused by the "Convert line breaks" setting and use of "Edit HTML" mode, has been eliminated by a more robustly designed post editor, and a new setting which applies in "Edit HTML" mode. The new setting will be found in "Post Options", which makes it settable per post, rather than per blog. Line break sensitive objects in the blog, like lists, preformatted blocks, and scripts, won't be broken any more by extraneous line breaks.
  • The ability to display typed HTML, literally, as HTML, without having to labourously convert each "<" and ">" to "&lt;" and "&gt;", before publishing.
  • An improved picture insertion procedure, with each picture being inserted where the cursor is, rather than at the top of the post.


For a more comprehensive, and optimistic, evaluation, see Roberto's Testing Blogger-in-Draft: Post Editor - Compose Mode.

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Comments

Fin said…
Thanks for trying out the new post editor. As you saw, it's not done yet. We're releasing early and iterating.

For a list of the new features and the missing ones that we'll be adding to Draft, take a look at the announcement blog post.
RaSh said…
Just tried out the new features (like Star Rating, Embedded Comments etc.) Though adding a link is more user-friendly (just like google pages), it seems to automatically close <div> tags.. which is VERY annoying! I finally had to switch to the old Editor while writing the recent post on my blog: IrRaShonally Urs!

Hopefully things will be better by the time it is "finally" added in Blogger :)
Bernhard said…
bug: if you have "hyperlinks" on your blog, for instance "http://#bottom", you change the view from html-view and then back, you will get html-stuff like "http://blogger.com/post-create.g?blog-ID=27701245008367/#bottom".

???
Nitecruzr said…
Hey B.,

This is nothing new. I've been noting that behaviour in the original post editor, with my "Top" link which goes at the bottom of each post, which gets scrambled each time. But thanks for noting that, I've always assumed that I was the only person bothered by it.

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