Alright …. So?

Do we have a export function that will help us migrate to wordpress? - NO

Do we have categories? NO

Are we making more sense with lables? NO

Can we switch back to olg blogger?(Yikes..!) NO

Blogger is anyway, out of beta. And the developers are pretty much excited about it.

We have a better dashboard now - Hmm…well, dont ask me what, but that’s what they say.
Yes, have you guys noted the help-resource box on the bottom right at the dashboard, in case you haven’t cheked it - the blogger status thing wont just work.It shows a 404 Forbidden error to me.

We have instant publishing now - no more illusionists circle!

We have a full feed option now - which is great! We could have individual feeds for all the comments on the blogs and posts.The RSS 2.0 formats also have been incorporated.Wicked!!

Protecting your blog - keep it within your family. Yep if you just don’t want to show your blog to others or you are a private deective, or just want to share your monthly expenses living in the US to family in India, use this feature!

Customized design - been there with the beta, just re enforcing the idea.

It would’ve been more interesting if the questions at the top were answered, but hey there’s the next version coming up sometime later - I’ll wait.

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10 things to keep in mind before selecting a theme

- Decide on the category/mood of your blog.
See what type of blog you’ve got already. And select a theme from the appropriate category(many template stores have this).
You would see an appealing theme in the theme selector but you wouldn’t want to apply a heavy artistic theme to a technology blog.

- See if you have a theme that will feature/support all the blocks your existing blog has.
i.e - Blogrolls, Technorati, Links etc.
If they don’t have these blocks, then see if there is space in the template so that you can incorporate it manually.

- See if the theme designer has a copyright license and has specified in the instructions on his site that the links to his blog(mostly in the footer) be maintained. If so, carefully study them. If you don’t want to link back to him, then better select another designer who is okay not linking to him.

- See if the designer has put in unwanted codes into the template, like affiliate links, redirection pages or even Google AdSense ads! They will not benefit you or even may harm you - so better stay away from them. You can find this out by comparing the source code with that of your existing blog.

- Test the skin on different screen sizes(800×600, 1-24×768….1280×1024 etc) and see how it looks, it’s better if you can strike a balance between all the sizes, and not stick to a theme because it works well on 1024×768, it may look ugly on another one.

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Okay, so you’ve shifted to blogger beta from the old blogger > then there’s bad news for you.
If you are planning to move to a new domain with a wordpress installation then, things are going to be even more troublesome.
Wordpress has a Import feature already that helps you import all your posts from blogger to wordpress in a matter of click. But it still is waiting for an upgrade that allows you to move from blogger beta. As of now, if you try the import feature on wordpress, it does not login to the blogger beta account.
There are a few suggestions made on the web that will help you do it - some stupid some partly working and some grunchy.

The simplest one is here.
- Goto your blogger beta blog, take the RSS feed(no body has explained how) and save it as an XML document. Now goto to wordpress import function, then select the “Import from RSS” option and browse select the XML file - Upload!
Although it may show that import successfull - It didn’t work for me the 12th time even.

Now the hard one (as on webbleyou.com)
This one is a bit tricky and tests your patience - i would give you an award for the “Most patient blogger” if you successfully did this.

The sad thing is that google doesn’t allow you to switch back to old blogger from blogger beta, so if you’ve been blogging since the last few years,bad luck!

So i warn all the professional bloggers around - If you are planning to move to a new domain with a professional wordpress installation, the keep away from the blogger beta - It’s a TRAP by Google and most likely you may disagree to Darren Rowse!

Cheers!

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UPDATE

After a few days from this post i found the real working script that imports your blogger beta posts,comments with url and images to wordpress.

Check it here

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