After a lot of deliberation, I finally decided to bite the bullet and switch to the new version of blogger. I am not a strong proponent of change, especially when the things are working fine as they are. But it seems likely to me that all the blogspot users will have to make a transition sooner or later, and this seemed a good time for me, since I have some leisure time at the moment. The major advantages I saw were the flexibility to label individual posts, and the drag-and-drop feature for editing template. The latter is a big boon to me as I am not very conversant with HTML. A not-so-major-one was, not to have to see that "publishing in progress" wheel everytime I tried to make a post. The minor ones were the ability to have private blogs, and the freedom from issues that keep rising when commenting to blogs that have already migrated.
The migration itself did not take much time or effort. The only frustrating thing that happened was the amount of time I was asked to wait while the blog was being migrated, only to be informed that it is going to take more time, and I shall be informed on my mail. So far, so good. I opened up the dashboard, and found the "new, improved" look (as advertised). It felt good, and I busied myself with labeling of my older posts.
Few minutes later, I noticed that the dashboard displayed a message "4 comments need to be moderated" on one of my blogs. (This sort of status is not displayed with the old blogger, and neither are the nummber of comments on each post). This puzzled me a lot, as as far as I remember, I have never allowed comment moderation for my blog. So, I spend a considerable amount of time trying to figure out where were the comments that required moderation. When everything else failed, I enabled comment moderation on my blog, and posted comments to myself. Now, this is of no use, as the new version of blogger seems to be intelligent enough not to ask the blog author for moderation or word verification of comments (I am thankful for this one at least!). So, to try out, I had to log out from the blogger, and post a comment as anonymous. Since this logged me off my gmail, and I have opted to receive notification on gmail id, I had to log back in to see the notification. After spending a number of log-out-log-in cycles, I managed to find the comments that were required to be moderated - two of them were spam, and the other two, over a year old!
I disposed of these to-be-moderated comments as appropriate, and reverted the comment settings. In the midst of this, I noticed that some of the previous posts were no longer showing the authors' ids against the comments, but only "anonymous". I checked out a number of posts; and some of them showed the authors' ids, while some did not! However, as I delved into the problem, it seemed likely that the comment authors who are now shown as anonymous are the ones who have already switched to new (or beta) blogger. (Cuckoo, BTR, PM are the adventurers who fall in this category, I believe, while Adi, Thinker are the champions of the "old is gold"). Blogger FAQ yielded no help, and Blogger Help Group only confirmed that other people out there have faced the same problem. No solution seemed apparent, and therefore I am afraid a large percentage of the few readers on my blog have been condemned to anonymity forever (as it is not possible to go back to the old version now). Resigning myself to fate, I browsed through the help group to discover which problems I was lucky to avoid, and which ones I might still face. The one that looks most troublesome at this time is that people on new version of blogger are not able to comment on the blogs that are on the older version. Now all I can do is hope that this will get fixed soon.
I attempted to customize the template using the new mechanism, without making significant changes at this point; and I must agree with the creators that it is indeed quicker and easy to use. The only problem I am having here is the look of the footer - the site-meter I recently added is now displayed as a part of the footer rather than a separate element. I also like the facility of editing the posts, and customizing other settings from the blog page itself. I was disappointed to find that if I click on a post link, it no longer shows me the archives or the older posts on the right hand side. I hope that these problems will be sorted out soon, or at least I will become accustomed to the inconveniences that are minor [or remember, It's not a bug - it's a feature :-)]. In the meanwhile I will hope not to encounter any major issues
