
Blogger’s fresh new look - NSMeta
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/bloggers-fresh-new-look.html
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michaelpinto
When it comes to Google I find myself eating my words from a year ago --
they've really gotten their act together in terms of cleaning up their product
line. I only hope they go to the next level and modernize the feature sets
Blogger to catch up with the Tumblrs of the world. I'm also encouraged by the
fact that they're shutting down side projects -- it's like when Jobs came back
to Apple and cleaned up the product line by killing off fanboy favorites like
the Newton and HyperCard (two products I loved).

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avolcano
I'm actually kinda surprised they did such a big revamp of Blogger, when I
thought in some ways they wanted to position Google+ as sort of a replacement
- being able to create public posts that are as long as you want, follow
people without them following you back, etc. I wonder if there will end up
being some cross-over between the two applications.

~~~
michaelpinto
I'd bet you that it's coming -- my gut tells me they've focused the big guns
on G+ and then will swing back to feature up other products to get a halo
effect.

~~~
skeptical
+1 (no pun intended) those services clearly have a large overlap. And there's
also google pages. On a related note, wordpress.com/.org, thumblr did manage
to held quite firmly. This also sounds like, not letting blogger degrade into
an obsolete bulk, which clearly was (is?) happening.

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lapusta
Yet another project rewritten in GWT. Interesting, how they decide what UI
technology to use in new products - GWT or Closure?

~~~
flyosity
Is it really done using GWT? Of the web engineer friends I know at Google,
most hate GWT and try to avoid using it whenever possible. Most Google
products don't use it.

~~~
OWaz
Do you know why they dislike GWT?

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flyosity
I know a lot of people who hate GWT, and it mostly boils down to GWT
"abstracting away" the web (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) such that you build web
applications with no regard for the web as a medium. You can't really build
software for a platform without knowing and understanding the constraints of
that platform, and GWT tries to hide this as much as possible which leads to a
lot of funky issues like huge memory footprints inside the browser,
undocumented hiccups between Java and the JavaScript it generates for you, and
a general lack of control over the user experience once it's within the
browser.

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wyclif
I'm gratified by this news, but there are a lot of dead blogs (5+ years with
no posts or more) and some squatting going on. I'd love to be able to petition
Google for one of these, but apparently the policy is that whoever registers
it has it for perpetuity.

~~~
kree10
One of my favorite time-wasters is to think of a word or phrase, tack on
".blogspot.com" and see what's there. I rarely find active blogs this way.

Just now I tried <http://chainsaw.blogspot.com/> and found a quintessential
blogger blog with a single decade-old entry. I'd love to read a followup post
but I know it will never happen.

Very occasionally I'll run into something like <http://grasses.blogspot.com/>
\- abandoned, and perfect that way.

There can be a kind of weird beauty in those forgotten blogs.

~~~
wyclif
I wonder if GOOG will allow users to petition for these namespaces. Unless
they do, it's doubtful that I'd ever use Blogger.

