After TechCrunch posted about the new version of blogger (currently in beta) I decided to give it a look, particularly to see what was going on with their feed support as TechCrunch claim that blogger would be switching to RSS2 for its feeds (revisiting TechCrunch it seems they’re now saying RSS2 will be offered in addition to atom so I don’t know if I misread that or it’s been updated. Personally I don’t see the point of adding RSS2 when you have Atom, and wonder if it might be confusing for some users, but I guess someone must disagree).
Creating a new blog on the beta service was as easy as we’ve come to expect and publishing an entry definitely feels faster, even if a single entry isn’t really a good basis for comparison. It’s nice to see tag support (even if they’ve chosen to call them ’labels’) and their inclusion will definitely make projects like my Greenbelt Collage much easier to explain to users.
So far, it looks as though blogger is sticking with atom with feeds switched on by default, and finally upgrading to valid 1.0 feeds for both entries and comments. The default setting is for the full text of both posts and comments to be available in Atom 1.0 feeds, with links to those feeds included by default in the templates. Support of Atom 1.0 rather than RSS 2 is very good news for those of us developing tools that aggregate or remix feed content, if for nothing more than its support for unique IDs.
Unfortunately there don’t seem to be autodiscovery links in the page headers and with the ability to edit the HTML directly not yet in place, there’s not even a way to add them manually. As feed support in browsers and OSs becomes more commonplace, it’s definitely to be hoped that autodiscovery links will be included by default to help keep feed support consistent.
Tags: atom, rss, blogger, autodiscovery, techcrunch