Since the Blogger-released Widget Code Help and Johan’s Post, progress on BETA conversion has been much easier. Check my BETA Blog and you’ll find that I have most of the old post functionality and look done, with the following exceptions:

• Feed information (often hidden) in template header. This is because Blogger BETA puts feed information for the whole blog in with the posts (that’s dumb) and basically expects you to have it in the footer of ever post (even dumber). Have yet to find a way around this (besides hard-coding the links).
• Peek-a-boo comments… uh… Blogger? Little help? Comment data is only accessible on item pages…
• Date no longer links to archive… that data is gone (and wasn’t terribly useful anyway)
• I haven’t got it so the colour-changer works yet, but you can’t see that from my blog 😉
• Minor XHTML breakage because the widget tags generate divs, and divs aren’t legal inside ul tags

Improvements due to BETA:

• Tags look the same, but are now drawn from the new labels field
• Peek-a-boo backlinks are no longer a hack
• Comment author is now properly marked up as an hCard

The sidebar will come next (widitized! although I’ll leave the comments for full XOXO-compliant blogrolls for advanced users), then perhaps some new features (like next/prev links on item pages). Then work will start on comment forms, etc.