As will soon be reported everywhere, I suppose, an updated version of Blogger is in beta. It doesn't grease all the creaky joints of the old version, but it looks promising. It also explains why earlier today I was getting some weird URLs when viewing profiles, redirections to beta.blogger.com.

Unfortunately, it's a limited beta, and I haven't gotten an invitation to migrate yet. Damn you, Blogger! Doesn't my old Blogger Pro account give me any perks?!

Update: Actually, I found the problem. Right now the beta only works for Blog*Spot users, not people who FTP files to their own servers. "Coming soon," though, or so they say.

Update 2: Hmm, this isn't promising for me. It looks as though Blogger/Google are going to focus solely on content they host via Blog*Spot.

How does Blogger in beta affect FTP blogs?

Blogger in beta is based on the concept of dynamic serving. Since people using the FTP or SFTP features are not hosting their blogs on Blog*Spot, they'll be unable to publish dynamically. We will continue to support FTP publishing in its current state (i.e. static web-pages created by Blogger and transferred to your server). However, new features that depend on dynamic serving will be unavailable to these blogs. For people who wish to take full advantage of all Blogger's features, we recommend switching to Blog*Spot publishing.

Bummer. It's cool that they are adding features for their hosted users, though.