Dear (Beta) Blogger,

DISCLAIMER: those are only thougths of a Blogger user, from the point of view of a Blogger user.

A lot of users are complaining about the Beta Blogger's bugs. Yes, there are some bugs (as in every beta), but I think everyone was expecting a GMail-style beta.
They're wrong.
In my opinion the real problem is not the number of bugs, but the way they've handled this release.
It seems an half baked product:

• A new super-fancy-visual template editor, but no raw-html editor. A lot Blogger users were using it in the Classic version, so, why a release without it?
• After a couple of weeks (thanks to the users feedback, it seems) they've added the raw-html editor. Looking at the templates' xml source it's clear Blogger Team has extended the template capabilities adding a new whole simil-scripting-language. GREAT!! But... where is the documentation?... Coming soon... they write...
• In the Classic Blogger a real gimme-it-now-please feature was the future posting. Now, with a dynamic serving system it should be really easy to implement... sorry no future posting at the moment.
• New system, new API... as for now, third party applications (like Filckr) and also Google applications like Picasa and Writely are not working with the beta API. A little pre-beta-testing could be better far all (users and Blogger) in order to have third party applications working with the beta from the very beginning.
  

In my opinion the new Beta, after those initial moments, will really be an excellent product, with a lot of possibilities, but the way it's being released is really unproductive and strange (at least for Google).

MH


[The picture is taken from here]