Pretty painless

Well, that was simple enough. For a while now, Blogger has been inviting me to switch to their Fancy! New! System!, Blogger in Beta, and the reminders were getting pretty insistent.

I didn't do it before because there was a bug that made it hard for Blogger users who have not yet switched to Beta to leave comments. But that's cleared up now and I don't think the remaining issues will affect anyone. Actually, I don't think most casual readers would have noticed at all - most of the differences have to do with features related to posting, formatting and managing the blog, not reading it.

There is one new thing, though, that you may enjoy. Posts can now be tagged with labels, and you can click on a label to find other posts that I have put into the same category. I assume I'll be able to go back and retroactively tag existing posts, although we probably shouldn't assume that I'll do it. But I might!

Edited to add:

Well, I've added labels to a lot of posts, and learned a couple of things.

First, if you click on the label (which I would rather call a tag) at the bottom of a post, it won't take you to a list of similarly-tagged posts, like I assumed it would. Instead, it will filter the blog so it displays every post with that tag (all on one page), and none of the others.

Second, I will be able to add a list of tags to the sidebar, but not until I update my template to the new system, which will probably involve at least a minor change of style, and possibly a redesign (if I feel like it at the time). But I'm not doing that today.

Tags I have applied retroactively so far:

• Bandwagon (32)
• Blogging (14)
• Car Trouble (15)
• Costa Rica (40)
• Day in the Life (8)
• Kids (108)
• Quilting (17)
• Translation (8)

Most are self-explanatory. Bandwagon is for memes, quizzes, and posts where all I do is link to something someone else wrote.

Feel free to let me know if you notice a mis-tagged post, or one that should be in a particular category but isn't. I did it on the basis of a list of all posts (289 to date, in case you've lost count), but I didn't pull up and re-read each and every one. I peeked into the ones I didn't recognize by their titles, but I could have missed something.