Blogger has been suffering severe hiccups lately due in part to the migration from the old Blogger to the new Google Blogger (eternal?) Beta. Many evenings, I cannot post to my blog due to some kind of system problems.

You have to wait for an invite to move your blog to the Beta. Yesterday, I got the invite.

Once moved, you can’t go back. Ack.

I have hacked my Blogger blog a bit and incorporated a categorizing system (old Blogger does not have one) via del.icio.us. The hack is a Greasemonkey script (by Johan at Ecmanaut) that’s integrated into the Blogger edit screen and gives me a Tags field, which ends up as a del.icio.us entry with a couple of clicks. It’s very slick but doesn’t work in the Blogger Beta world where they now have labels (read “tags”) for your entries. Can I convert my tags to labels easily? (If you’re interested in Blogger hacks, check out Fresh Blog.)

Second problem is my commenting system which uses Haloscan because Haloscan has a trackback feature and old Blogger doesn’t (not sure if trackbacks are in Beta or not).

Problem 3 is I host this blog on my own server via ftp. That will still work in the Beta but I will miss some cool dynamic publishing features. Changing will mean a new URL and I am not clear as to whether Beta will suck up my old entries if I switch to hosting at Google Blogger.

Although switching to the Blogger Beta is not compulsory today, word in the blogosphere is that it will be in a matter of weeks. I need a plan of attack.

• Read Blogger Beta help or at least the parts about migration.
• Start a new Blogger Beta blog and play around with it.
• Check out Blogger Buzz, Google’s blog for Blogger.
• Monitor the Blogger Help Group.
• Backup my blog content on my server before the switch.

I’m sure you’ll note the switchover when it comes along.