Blogger Beta: Feature complete

Google’s blog service, Blogger, announced this last week that Blogger Beta is ‘feature complete.’

Aside from its interface being available in French, Italian, German or Spanish (with more languages on the way), you can now publish blogs via S/FTP, a feature formerly available on the older version of Blogger. Beta’s FTP functionality is significantly enhanced however — it includes Label support!

If you use FTP on the older version of Blogger, you should definitely log into the beta and set up a test FTP blog to make sure it can publish properly to your ftp server. We did a ton of FTP testing on several different popular hosting services, but if you experience any publishing weirdness, let us know via the Contact form — use the ‘Report a bug or problem’ -> ‘I found a bug with Blogger in beta’ selection to send in reports, ’cause we wanna fix the bugs ASAP.

Most importantly, the addition of FTP to the beta means that account migration will soon (like Really Really Soon) be available to all Blogger users — it’s currently just enabled for blogspot users. Thank you all for your patience with the recent outages and networking problems – they’ll soon be a thing of the past!

I’d be interesting in hearing from anyone using Blogger Beta what they think. Darren Rowse, who asked the same question, has received mostly favorable comments.

For those considering the use of blogs for the marketing of a professional service firm, I’d still go slow on Blogger. I’d want to be in a little more control of my destiny.