Upgrading Your Blogger Account to Version 3 (part 1)

Google has a knack for naming its products and services beta. There’s this sense of perfectionism with this, because a product, no matter how good it already is, is not out of “beta” until it is good enough to be considered a final product. Hence, many of Google’s services have been in “beta” state for years before they were finally given version 1 or higher labels.

Blogger is one of these products. It has been almost seven years since Pyra, the original owner of Blogger, created the blogging service. When Google bought Blogger, the service was called “Blogger Beta”. Blogger had gone through several changes but none were considered major. That is until recently, when Google announced version 3–blogger was also now out of “beta.”

With this new version, Blogger introduced new features that set Blogger nose-to-nose with its competitors like WordPress and TypePad. Yes, while Blogger is still the biggest blogging service around, it was being edged out in terms of features and functionality. But with this upgrade, Blogger was at par with the rest of the pack.

Dynamic pages. Previously, Blogger published static HTML pages everytime a user creates a post or changes layout (such as on Blogger’s own hosting service, blog*spot). This made publishing excruciatingly slow (compared to other services, that is, since it only takes less than a minute), especially if you’re republishing your entire site with a new layout. Other blogging services, meanwhile, were using databases to store posts and other information.

Now, Blogger also uses databases to store post content and blog settings. So when you publish a post or change layouts, you no longer have to republish the entire site. And saving settings (or publishing posts) is faster.

Access control. This is also one advantage Blogger’s competitors had. By default, blog posts are publicly accessible. But a user can lock certain posts for viewing only by selected people (or password protected). The new Blogger adds this feature, which lets users lock posts for reading only by authorized users (by email address/Google account), or only limited to blog authors (for team blogs).