Blogger: how sweet it is ….
Jul 9th, 2007 by robynjay
[image: Gary Forsdick]
It’s been a while since I dabbled in Blogger but this morning I set up a blog for our VET Pedagogy leadership team (we’re trying a group blog).
What I found was a huge make-over that makes Blogger even more delicious than before for non-techo users.
I’ve been bemoaning for some time the apparent ‘jump-ship’ of our more tech-savvy compatriots away from what I would consider to be the ‘true’ social software over to more sophisticated applications. Sure, I understand the logistics - hey, we’ve gone with mediawiki and I love it, but for real people out in the field we need software that is free (or cheap minus ads etc) and easy to master. That’s what social software is all about! That’s what Web2.0 is all about! Giving ‘normal’ people a voice; the ability to be content creators and have an independent presence online.
So what’s new in Blogger?
Remember the battle you had to add widgets, links, feeds etc to your navigation bar? Now it’s a piece of cake.
In the Blogger dashboard TEMPLATE tab there is now a PAGE ELEMENTS area that allows you to easily add a range of features to 2 areas of your navigation bar or the bottom of the blog: video, feeds, images, labels (categories), html, text, links etc. Once inserted you can edit them and joy of joys, move their position by dragging and dropping.
[image: nswlearnscope, screengrab from blogger dashboard ]
It’s not perfect (I had some trouble with an image hanging off the right hand side of the nav bar and getting a FlickR badge to sit centre) but it’s a great improvement.
I’ll be working on a ‘how to’ guide for the wiki so if you haven’t tried a blog yet, give it a go.