September 3, 2006

Pete's visit to my blog

Pete, a Blogger Beta developer, visited my blog and clarified about the new URL for labels. It seems the change is to follow the rel-tag microformat so that tag-based applications can work with Beta blogs. Good move! I am also happy that my blog is under the radar screen of a Blogger employee.

Assuming that Pete will come back to my blog at some point, I have some rants below:
1. When I link to others' blog posts, my post doesn't show up as a backlink in their blog i.e. outbound backlinks from Beta blogs don't seem to work. I know that there used to be a nofollow meta tag in Beta template but I believe it has been removed (I checked in my blog too). Why doesn't backlinks work still?
2. In labels widget, the list of posts associated with each label is not available as data. Is this because each post could have many labels and there could be too many posts? If this was available, we could have displayed labels also in Hierarchy style which is much more flexible than Links list.
3. My migrated blog's comment feed URL gives me an error "We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.". Others who migrated have reported similar issues or stale comments in the feed (it seems to work fine for new blogs created in Beta). I didn't get any useful response from Blogger support when I reported this. Hope this is something being looked into. If this feed works, then it would be easy to show the recent comments in sidebar!

That's it for now :)

6 comments:

Fin said...

I'm flattered that my "visit" has warrented a post of its own. :)

I'll say that folks on the team have been keeping up with this blog and others. It's totally fun for us to see the new beta features (esp. Layouts) out in the hands of people who are exploring and playing with them. I hope you do more cool things with them.


As for your questions, I'll answer what I can:

1. I saw your post show up as a backlink on my Buzz post about the login box, so it's not all broken. I know that the super-restrictive robots.txt file that was (accidenally) in place early on played a bit of havoc w/ blog search engines (Google's included) that's still sorting out. Blog search indexing issues in general are something that's on our radar.

2. Sounds like a feature request! This may come up in the future.

3. I've seen a few bug fixes on this front go by, and they'll be out soon. This is one of the "it's not you, it's us" things, which is why support couldn't help you.

Hope that answers things at least somewhat. As long as you keep playing with the beta, I'll keep reading the blog!

Unknown said...

oh wow, Pete, it's so nice that you replied to all my questions. I will wait for the bug fixes and list of posts for each label. These would encourage people like us to come up with more hacks. We all want to see the new Blogger to evolve as a feature rich and hacker-friendly blogging platform :)

Fin said...

Re: #3

all fixed

Unknown said...

Great news, Pete!! I just checked my comment feed and one other and there was no error. But, only stale comments seem to be there. If you check my comment feed URL, the first comment is from August 18.

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/30859916/comments/full

I hope it's just a matter of time that it gets updated with the latest. Thanks for your update.

Fin said...

Ah, yes. Covered here.

Anonymous said...

hello dude, i will respect you if you can do this "make any one can create thier own topic/post to my blog" just like a forum buz, no need to register..