tweaks to blogger & drafts

They appear to have tweaked the layout and structure of blogger.

Generally speaking I often find myself having quite conservative reactions to changes like this.  I try to be open minded, but it’s difficult sometimes, especially if you’re talking about something that works perfectly well (or suits your needs perfectly).  Change for change’s sake is rubbish - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Of course, sometimes you only realise it was broke after they fix it, but this isn’t one of those cases.  However, I have to say I actually quite like these changes they’ve made.  They’ve added some stuff that, while not necessary, is quite nice/useful, and they’ve not broken anything.

It also looks prettier and feels more involved and a smidge more professional.  As I say, I don’t think it is actually changed much, but it has a nicer, cleaner feel to it.

I’ve not played with everything yet, but certainly the stats are nice.  Being a numbers nerd, stats are always nice, of course.

The new layout also showed me that something odd had happened to some of my posts.  Whether in fact they were fine before and got broken by the change I can’t know for sure, but I actually think it was some problem that I hadn’t realised.

Basically, quite a few (around a dozen over the years) of my posts had not been published.  Instead, they’ve been saved as drafts.  Quite why these particular posts never got published, I don’t know, but it was fairly clear from the page view counter they hadn’t been.

As I say, it was a bit of a random selection and I thought I was in the habit of always checking the blog once I’d published a new entry, but clearly something had gone wrong somewhere.

It would also explain a discrepancy I noticed a few times before, where two of the numbers that showed the number of blog posts didn’t quite seem to add up.  I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was something along the lines of the number of posts and the number of entries were different, because one must have been including all these drafts where the other wasn't.