New stuff

Google has been trying me to switch my Blogger account to their new system for a while now, but I've refused because...well...I don't know. I'm lazy and scared of new experiences. Satisfied, Dr. Freud?

Anyway, they finally held my blog hostage and wouldn't allow me to log in again until I switched over to their new system. So I switched! Hooray for consumer choice! Not that this is really an issue of consumer choice, but I'm told it's not whining if you pretend to have a higher cause of some kind.

Anyway, the first new feature I noticed (besides the new funny-looking buttons) was a labels thing. Now I can label posts and Blogger will somehow sort them into categories, or something, I don't know. I've done this for two different labels, so now you can see all the chapters of my memoirs and all the Marmaduke posts in two separate but convenient places. If I develop another series (I have high hopes for this; my hopes have kind of faded on this, though), then I guess I'll add a label for that, too. Or maybe I won't unless I figure out how to tinker out with the system, because of the way it prints "Labels:" at the bottom of the page in the exact same font and color and everything, so it looks like a part of the post. Really annoying. I'll try to change that.

Another new feature I've noticed: it seems that no matter how far back in time you go, the sidebar always shows the last ten posts under "Previous Posts." I don't know when this started happening, but that's not the way I liked it. I'll probably have to put the archives back up on the side, probably with the ugly triangles like every other blog. Consumer choice! In the meantime, if you're really desperate to find something, just search, I guess. I think that works, though I've had a lot of pretty bad luck searching with that little bar up top there.

Finally, I enjoyed the suggested labels that Bloogler (Googer? Boggle? Golga?) gives someone discovering the system for the first time. Screenshot below:


I like how they separate scooters and fall, like they don't think we're going to notice. They know as well as I do that no one would read a post labeled "scooters" unless it was also labeled "fall." And it would also help with labels like "disaster," "injury," "vicious clothesline" and "YOU CAN SEE HIS BRAINS!"