Now that I've had a bit of time to play with the blogger beta I've got to say that the new features are quite cool.

A few days ago the blogger team made some changes to allow editing of the html behind the new templates. This meant I could change to the new template but keep pretty much the same layouts as what I had with the old templates, including all the little add-ons like the librarything books and the del.icio.us tags.

It's really nice to be able to customise the new templates, add to and change the order of sidebar elements, etc. It's also nice to be able to tag posts without having to resort to the various workarounds that have been published on the net.

I'm looking forward to see what else they add in the beta. Good work blogger.

Oh, by the way, Windows Live Writer doesn't work with the beta so I'm back to writing entries via the interface. Such is life - I'm sure it won't be long before that's sorted out.