"New Blogger" Labels: Report from the Trenches

In a season of controversy over the new back end for Blogger, three issues have emerged on the help community as especially problematic: 

images, scrolling, and (read on) labels for posts.

Labels, and their ability to sort posts into pages by topic, are a central feature of blogging in general.  So, pretty important!

The good news: buried in The New Blogger is all the label functionality that the legacy interface provides.

But the TNB interface to that functionality is so confusing and difficult that many cannot add labels from within a post in the editor.

(Other good news: Google is taking these issues seriously.)

Adding labels to posts

Instead, users are adding labels from the posts page, by choosing "add labels to this post" from the set of options that each post shows on hover.

This summons a checkbox of existing labels, and you can select one or more and then apply that choice.

It's a bit of a chore if there are many labels in the blog, since a lot of scrolling is involved. Being able to filter those choices would be better.

You can add labels from the post editor. I did so with this post. 

Also, there is a filter for applying labels—in the editor.

But, it does not work.

The filter, where you can type part of the label and limit the choices, is either broken or causes the entire operation to work by some set of rules that I cannot figure out.

I just have to believe that Google is working on this one.

Filtering labels

What do I think of label filtering in TNB? That it would be a good idea. 

It's not unusual for blogs to have many labels. I use them extensively on my main blog.

In TNB, the filter works just fine in limiting the list of label choices based on matches with what you type in the "Add a label" field.

This is exactly how filtering works in the legacy interface too.

However, the TNB editor forgets any choices you make if you use the filter!

So, filter to find a label and check it off. Filter again, and the first choice is lost.

If you don't use the filter, you can apply labels from the checklist. But gosh, that filter is a handy thing in Legacy. It would be great if it worked in TNB.

Batch editing of labels

Another very useful label editing feature involves applying or removing labels from groups of posts, all at once.

The classic use case is someone who has inconsistently applied similar labels (such as "Chocolate" and"chocolate") to posts, who now wants to standardize.

So, this blogger needs to (1) locate all the posts labeled "Chocolate," (2) add to all of those the label "chocolate," and then (3) remove the label "Chocolate." Without going through the posts one at a time.

It is entirely possible to do that in both the legacy and new interfaces (as long as you do it in the right order).

I wrote a tutorial on this not too long ago, lavishly illustrated with screen shots from the Legacy blogger. Soon to be obsolete.

That will teach me! But if you can find the controls in TNB, you can perform the same operation.

Hide and Seek

The locations of those controls (on the Posts page that lists all the posts) are as follows:

• You can filter the posts (to find, say, all the ones labeled "Chocolate") using "filter by label." It is a dark gray "tag" icon at upper right.
• Select those posts by checking the "select all posts" box that is directly below "filter by label."
• Once you do that, the option to add or remove a label will appear in "apply labels to selected posts," another dark gray tag but located in an orange banner at the very top of the editor.

The functional names of these tools, unfortunately, only appear if you hover your mouse printer or finger or whatever you've got over an icon.

We'll all get used to this, I am sure. But it makes Blogger less friendly and discoverable by new users, with a steeper learning curve.