I found a great post called 18 Ways for Blogger to Beef Up, which inspired me to create my own top 10 list of things that would improve Blogger using some of their tips, and some of mine. While they have 18 of ’em, I think that the following are the things that are most important for most bloggers.
1. Categories and Tagging
Everyone else does it, it’s high time Blogger did too. We all want categories, and with the social bookmarking that’s going on these days, Blogger needs to get with the times.
2. RSS Feeds based on Categories or Tags
Not everything on a blog is related to what the reader might be interested in. Maybe they’d be interested in only some parts of what a blog is about. For example, my blog has a lot of posts on all kinds of different ‘categories’. Wouldn’t it be good to subscribe to an RSS Feed only of the category or categories that you have an interest in? Of course it would.
3. Scheduled posts
Sometimes it’d be great to write a post now but schedule it to be posted later, so that you don’t need to be around to do it at the time. Like when you’re going on holiday and you want to make sure your blog remains active while you’re away.
4. Plug-in support
WordPress has ‘widgets’, little plug-ins that add extra functionality. These would be great for Blogger to have as well, allowing greater customisation and functionality with your blog.
5. Blogger + Google Calendar
While a calendar could be included as a ‘widget’, Google Calendar is apparently coming out soon, and would be a welcome part of blog integration. You could replace the Archives functionality with the Calendar, allowing calendar dates to show up as links which lead to posts done on that date.
6. Photo archives
Blogger allows image integration into the blog, but has no way of archiving such images. It’d be great to have a Photo Archives page, possibly called ‘photo blog page’ or something like it, allowing you to access all the images on your blog in one location.
7. RSS Feed aggregation
There are blogrolls that link to various other blogs, and there are RSS readers that show headlines or small amounts of content from other blogs. Having the two integrated in some way, so that you can bring together various headline or content feeds from your favourite blogs to be shown in your sidebar, would be a good thing.
8. Better comments
Adding the comments form to the bottom of each post would be a much better idea, so that visitors can quickly add their comments to the page without having to go to a separate comments page.
9. Better blog flagging
Blogger currently has ‘flag this blog’ as an option when you browse through various Blogger blogs, allowing visitors to flag blog that they consider objectionable in some way – including spam. They should improve it with a drop-down list, so that you can select ‘spam‘ or ‘offensive‘ or ‘add to blogroll‘ or ‘add to RSS aggregator‘.
10. Better spam control
I really hate having to fill out that ‘captha’ image thing every time I add a frackin’ comment to my blog, or someone else’s. I should only need to log in once and fill out a captcha, and then every time I want to fill out a comment from that point on, I shouldn’t be bothered by that captcha crap. And sometimes you can’t even read the lettering on the images they use, and have to fill it out multiple times before you get it right. It sucks!
So there you have the ten most important things – as far as I’m concerned. Please feel free to add your own things that you would like to see, by adding a Comment to this post.
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