'New' Blogger: Gains and Losses

READY OR NOT, HERE IT COMES

That "new Blogger" invitation that users have seen on their dashboards since last year will become the only Blogger "by late July," according to a May 20 blog post from Google.

Although the change does provide a few new features, it is fundamentally a redesign of the dashboard and editor, with the same Blogger functions under the hood.

This project has shaped up a lot in the past few months, to the point where it is worth describing what it looks like we will be getting—and losing.

But please note that Google is still seeking comments from us, so we can continue to help the developers to improve the final result.

Mobile Friendliness

The driving force behind this redesign is a desire to let you compose, manage, and publish posts from your phone.

The New Blogger, like the 2017 Blogger themes, has a responsive design that flows and changes to fit the screen of the device you are using, from desktop to tablet to phone.

Gains and Losses

RESPONSIVENESS VS FAMILIARITY

We'll see if I ever blog from my phone, but this is clearly a legitimate goal.

What we lose from such a radical rethinking of the user interface is all the stuff we are used to—the icons we know by sight and location, the little workflows for importing and formatting images, and all the things we know.

Some of the changes represent real losses, but most of this is going to be fine once we learn it.

Those changes will take getting used to, though! Give the new editor a spin and see if you can figure out how to switch to HTML mode. (Spoiler: It is now a toggle, at upper right, and the icon is an incomprehensible < >.)

The dashboard pages for posts no longer paginates. Instead, there is infinite scrolling. So if there is an operation you wish to perform on many posts, you can select all of them at once.

Unfortunately, to do that, you have to scroll manually multiple times for the posts to load. It can be time consuming.

GAINS

Width—The central column on the dashboard pages is narrower on desktop, easier to scan and use.

This rectifies a bad design decision made during the last redesign eight years ago.

Stats—The statistics page replaces a defective, broken reporting system with one that is based on Google's own tracking tools. A big win.

Filtering Posts—On the Posts, and Pages, pages, there is a new system of filtering the posts that lets you build complicated searches such as "All the draft posts with the word 'pickle' in the title and labeled 'macroeconomics,' in reverse order."

Preview now gives you the option of seeing how the post will look in a number of devices.

Gains on the editor:

Tables—Still a work in progress, this tool promises the ability to insert a table, useful for organizing text and images.

Code—"Format as Code" is a new tool that applies the "pre" HTML tag so you don't have to type it yourself in the post HTML.

Links—There is an option for anchor links in the interface now. In the right sidebar, there is a way to make the title of your post a hyperlink to something other than the post.

World Options let you format type, including right-to-left, for different languages. Selecting a language provides access to tools to insert non-Latin characters (Ø) and diacritical märks. ¡Olé!

Check out the option where you can draw the character or symbol you want.

These are purely formatting and typographical tools. They do not introduce any markup that overrides the language setting for your blog.

HTML—The HTML mode in the editor is hard to find (again, < >) but has two new features, a tool that formats the HTML, and search and replace options.

The searches can use regular expressions (but do not require them), so if that is your thing, you are in luck. (Regular expressions are like wildcard searches on steroids.)

Incidentally the editing tools in the editor are now on a responsive accordion menu that collapses the tools from the right into a drop-down menu as the screen width shrinks.

You can observe this effect on desktop by resizing the browser window.

LOSSES

It's not just the familiarity that is gone. There is some functionality on the chopping block as well.

Some of this is due to some design decisions that are, in my view, faddish. It looks as though the designers have sometimes put an abstract aesthetic before human factors that are pretty well understood.

I also want to say that, although the full set of tools are there, the inscrutable (if hip) design has made some of the icons look too similar.

Since some of the operations they perform are not reversible, this will surely end in tears for someone.

Apparently, we still just don't value user experience enough.

Pages and Posts—It's going to be a little harder to find things here. The new page is less tabular (each element in its own column), which makes it harder to scan quickly.

Also, if you have multiple labels on a post, you will only see the name of the one that is first in the alphabet. To see the others, hover your pointer over the "+ more" counter.

The hovers are not clickable, however. TNB thus sacrifices the ability to filter by label with a click.

Spam Comments—You should always mark spam comments, and the old interface hides them from you once marked—unless you want to review them.

In TNB the default comments view includes spam, and you have to select a filter that excludes them, every time you view the page.

Theme preview—On the Theme page, many of us (perhaps all of us) are unable to preview themes.

Losses on the editor:

Special Characters—The tool that lets you insert hundreds of special characters is gone. Only some of the lost characters are available though the new languages options.

Desktop bloggers can probably get around this.

Webcam—The option to insert an image from a webcam is gone. This legacy option relied on obsolete technology. I doubt anyone will miss it.

The remaining insertion options are now indicated with better names. "From this blog" and "from Google Album Archive" have been merged. Maybe this "loss" is really a gain—of simplicity.

Options—Some of the formatting options in the right sidebar have been removed. In TNB, the only options there relate to allowing and showing comments.

This is a post-or page-specific setting not to be confused with blog-wide comment settings found in Settings.

HTML—This mode no longer includes tools for bold, italics, strikethrough, block quote, or insert image, though these are all available in Compose mode.

To be fixed, I hope—At the moment, there is no way to remove heading formatting without venturing into HTML mode. Labels are a mess, photos will not wrap, and there are reports of other issues in the Blogger help community.

Also, you can't drag and drop photos into the new editor.

Hey, the text-wrap-around-photos issue got fixed while I was proofreading this. Go feedback!

To Know and Do

There are plenty of other things that are different. At the moment assaying TNB feels like trying to walk across a familiar room in the dark after the furniture has been rearranged.

But for the most part, everything is still there.

LEAVE FEEDBACK

This has unfolded quickly, and we should believe Google when it tells us that the result of this process will become the new normal this summer.

Right now is our chance to make this future standard be good. We can report bugs, complain about missing features, and tell Google what we find difficult or confusing or dysfunctional.

Once this project is officially done, the developers will have other work to do. But right now, they really want to hear from us.

"Leave Feedback" is an option under the Help menu, which on TNB is is available through an icon at upper right in the shape of a question mark inside a circle.

At least, that is what it looks like today.

P.S.

Google characterizes these changes somewhat differently. Here is the official take.