Upgrading to Blogger Beta

I’ve already written a couple of times about software updates and on the beginning of the week I found another reason to do that. I upgraded my blog to brand new Blogger beta version. Quick advice: don’t make the same mistake.

I’m not a user, who needs very sophisticated features. The blog was almost the same as template it had grown up from. I’ve made only few tweaks since I started it – switching a side for sidebar, adding link on a post title etc. I thought upgrade would be easy and painless. First step was easy indeed. The rest wasn’t that good.

Being distrustful I started from making backup of my blog template. Then I jumped into the Blogger World of Upgrades. A process is automatic. “Make it in three easy steps”. Cool. Click, click, click and I was done. First red light turned on when I was asked to choose a template. Hm, I’ve already chosen one, when I was starting the blog. Is it safe for tiny little tweaks I’ve made since then?

No, it isn’t. Say goodbye to your changes. I know why Blogger forces to take clean template – most of changes new beta brings are actually in the template so it’d hard to add them to every single existing blog (including those customized very deeply). Still, I believe there are many blogs, which were changed just slightly, e.g. by adding AdSense, some custom scripts from services like Technorati, Feedburner or Digg or changing a position of sidebar. Wouldn’t it be cool to have all those tweaks on the board together with new features like labels? It definitely would. Was that so hard to develop? I don’t think so. Yeah, it wouldn’t work in every case, but they didn’t even try.

OK, I said farewell to my changes with no sorrow. I had my old template backup, so migrating tweaks into a new one shouldn’t be a problem, right? Wrong. There is no feature allowing changing the code of template for now. It’s “coming soon”. New red lights turn on here. Many of them. However you can find an option to downgrade now to the old version of Blogger. I was close to use it but I gave them a chance.

I started adding all those scripts to new page elements (that’s how the call it) in new cool drag and drop editor I got instead of good old raw template text editor. I’d love the new one as an option, but not the heck as a replacement. I added some work from myself by switching background and text colors, so I had to generate e.g. AdSense scripts once again. After a longer while I got all of my tweaks implemented (what a big word for creating them with wizard) in my new template. At least that’s how I thought then.

After a day or something I checked my statistics in Google Analytics. Was that really possible that no one’s been on the site for such a long time? Strange. No, not strange – I forgot about Analytics’ script. Sure, that’s my fault, but Blogger didn’t help me anyhow.

When I was testing brand new look of the blog I found an issue with layout in IE 6.0. After a while of testing I found that one of pictures I added to the blog is guilty – it was wider than a post area. Yes, I widened it in the old template. Now I can’t because there’s no option to do that from the UI, and template’s code can’t be changed directly. I can’t switch sidebar to the left. I can’t add a custom script to post footer. I can’t have my blog looks like I want. I can’t even have my blog looks the same like before upgrade. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t...

Not only was upgrading a pain in the ass but it also limited Blogger functionality in very important area. The latter is a major sin. Early adopters are usually ready to go through hell to get a bunch of new features, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to sacrifice features they already have. In that case not having ready raw template editor in Blogger Beta meant not heaving ready whole version to go public. Sorry, you’ve screwed it up guys. If I had another chance I’d wait for another version.

Related articles:
Upgrading Applications
Upgrading Applications Follow-up
Upgrades and Lost Functionalities
Software Updates