Ah... relaxation

Most of the hard work's done now, Pete said, hopefully. :o)

This redesign is because I always meant to give peripathetic a facelift sooner or later. My mind was made up this morning when I came upon this post on MetaFilter, and thought, hmm, Blogger's had an upgrade, I wonder what's new.

Loads of people collaborated on it and are clearly very proud of themselves and relieved the work's over. A bit like me! But what exactly is new?

1. User interface: I used it only today, when I was fiddling with the default template
2. CSS templates designed by real, wellnown, respected web guys out there. Thanks to Douglas Bowman (who redesigned Wired) for mine. And sorry Doug, I mucked with it a little
3. Posts on their own individual pages which I don't use for reasons of valuable space
4. Comments (a first for Blogger) which you can open only to other Blogger users if you wish. I tried them, found them quite basic from an admin point of view, and removed them because they also require you to use no. 3 above
5. Profiles for individual users which can link to other blogger users, which, as someone elsewhere pointed out, would be a hell of a lot more useful if they were incorporated into Orkut and Gmail etc., also run by Google. I don't use my profile. No desire to, but I can see why others would

Now, don't get me wrong.

Even though I really only use feature number 2, I'm sure there's loads that the complete novice would be more than happy with. But one thing I really, really wanted to see was the ability for users of the free service to get proper RSS feeds instead of Atom. I have an Atom feed on here (below the sidebar) but come on. If they can give Gmail users a gigabyte of space each for their emails, they can give us RSS.

Like I said though, it was nice to have something new to play with, and the fact that so many of the templates rely on XHTML and CSS means I'll be forced to learn more, which is always good.

[UIpdate] I've added a new comments and trackback system using Haloscan, so if you commented before, your comments are all gone, I'm afraid. It should be more reliable (and it handles better) than YACCS. Sorry for the deletions though!