The new Blogger has been out of beta for a little while now so recently I decided to switch some of my podcast sites based on Blogger over from the old version to the new and improved version.

Despite multiple assurances on the screen that everything would be okay with the switch over something has happened with the resulting feeds provided by Blogger.

I’m seeing that some of the posts are now presented in the atom feed out of order. Even worse, I can’t get the feed to display more than 20 items no matter what setting changes I make in the Blogger dashboard.

I’ve been on Blogger since 2000 and I’m very familiar with the interface. The help section for feeds isn’t much of a help either. There are still some bugs to be worked out. Unfortunately they are bugs that affect the flow of information from some of my sites. And I’ve been trying to use the site feed to help me port over a blog to WP 2.1.

That process will now take quite a bit longer since I need to adjust the dates in the items after import into WordPress so that posts show up in the correct order. But that’s my cross to bear for the moment.

The point I want to make is that I’m thoroughly unimpressed with the progress Blogger has made since acquisition by Google. Support for RSS has been very slow, and now hidden. You can add ‘?alt=rss’ to the end of your feed to get RSS. TrackBacks are still not natively supported. Way too many spam blogs exist in their system. No plug ins to extend the features. I could go on.

Blogger had been good to me as a basic blogging tool up until a couple of years ago. Then when my needs got out in front of the capabilities of the Blogger system. You would think that a player with the position of Google could keep the service competitive. They haven’t. And I’ve moved on to WordPress as my the default provider that I recommend to new people starting a blog for the first time.

[tags]Social Media, Blogger, Feeds, Atom, Google, Problems[/tags]