1. Beef up Blogger

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    Googlist has published a list of "18 Ways for Blogger to Beef up". I strongly support most of the point there given, and have some comments and some points of my own.

    1 and 2 - Category support
    While the greasemonkey script and FreshTags method works fine, I must admit this would still be a welcome feature. One thing that concerns me, though, is that it will be poorly done and force those of us who want the features to contine using a hack on a system that supports it natively… I'm not going to want to lose the FreshTags functionality now that I've got it, and while FreshTags is not bound to del.icio.us, it is bound to having a decent way to extract post by tag programatically.

    5 - Plugin support
    If they enable this with any sort of usefulness it will eliminate their need to do some of the other stuff — we'll do it for them!

    7 - Static pages
    This would be an incredibly useful feature, but one addition could make all of Blogger that much more useful — WYSIWYG. I happen to dislike WYSIWYG, but there are a lot of non-coders out there who don't agree with me and resent the fact that they are bound to the boring blogger templates for their Look and Feel. If Blogger created some simple way to edit template basics without coding for those people they could much better appeal to 'the masses'.

    12 - Non-image File upload
    Please, Blogger? Hosting images here is lovely, but what about my JavaScript includes? Or external pieces of CSS?

    14 - Trackbacks
    Backlinks are swell, but incomplete. I want to be able to send and recieve proper trackbacks too — and haloscan, while it works, is just so ugly.

    17 - SPAM
    I, for one, would like to see some conditional moderation, as seen on WordPress. I don't want to have to approve every single comment, but I'd rather have outright SPAM quarantined. And what about the ability to block certain users from commenting? A lot of the comment SPAM I get here is tied to a Blogger account and could be easily blocked if they'd just let us.

    Other
    Another interesting thing, that I've been waiting for for a long time, is the integration of Blogger with the Google Accounts system. A page for the login is already active, but not functional as of yet. Looks promising.

    Comment feeds anyone? Blogger Recent Comments works, but nothing beats native support, especially if they start offering RSS 2.0 feeds with wfw:commentFeed support natively on top of that.

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    Stephen Weber at 2006-03-14 02:32 | 4 Comments / Trackbacks
Stephen Paul Weber