Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Pages come to Blogger-in-Draft

Note: As of 9 am this morning, January 21, Pacific time, this feature was 'temporarily' disabled. While pages created work, new pages can't currently be added. Pages were restored at 9:32 PM Pacific according to the link above.


If you're actually reading this on the website, and not on Facebook, or through a newsfeed, you will see links at the top of the blog to several pages I have created.

Pages are something new for Blogger - released today in "Blogger-in-Draft." If you have a 'Blogger' blog, you can access Blogger-in-Draft at draft.blogger.com. New features for the blogging software are released there first, giving users a chance to "beta-test" them.

Those of you who use WordPress, perhaps Blogger's biggest competitor, may be scratching your head in disbelief, as WordPress has had pages for years. Basically, pages are the same thing as posts, but they don't have dates attached to them. So they don't appear in your archive. You link to them in your sidebar or underneath your header as I have done.

The Blogger-in-Draft blog has an explanation, with more details.

The pages I created are copies of pages I had created at my personal domain, and had been linking to from my sidebar. I removed the links, as they will be easier to edit and update here. Several of them do need some updating.

If you try it, and discover that your paragraph breaks are disappearing, under Post Options change "convert newlines" to "ignore newlines." That should work. Blogger will probably fix this bug soon, and you won't have to do that. Playing with something when it is in 'beta' always has its quirks.

A hat tip to Jasia, who mentioned this new feature on Facebook, and Miriam who shared it on Google Reader. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known about it.

8 comments:

Greta Koehl said...

This is great news - thanks for sharing this.

Miriam Robbins said...

I am thrilled Blogger finally offers this. Do you know how many pages a blog can have?

John said...

As of now, the maximum number of pages is 10.

Anonymous said...

I read your blog through Google Reader and I can see these links just fine.
Thanks for passing on this tip - I will be adding this to my very new genealogy blog.

John said...

Debbie - If you follow the link to my blog that Google Reader provides, and you needed to click to make a comment, you then were able to see the Page links at the top of the website, because you left Google Reader.

But within Google Reader, when you were just reading the text of my post, I don't think you are able to see them.

Anonymous said...

John, yes I get the Google Reader results on my iGoogle page and click on them from there.
I've added the Pages to my blog, but I don't see how to add a page.
Maybe it takes a while?

John said...

Debbie: At 9am Pacific Time this morning they disabled the feature.

http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2010/01/pages-come-to-blogger-in-draft.html

When it returns, if it works the same way, you will see an "Add Page" button next to where you see the "Add Post" button. As long as you are accessing blogger at http://draft.blogger.com

Maude Fortman said...

One of my pages when I do edit content it takes me to Html. The other pages I can edit and it doesn't take me to html? I do love the pages feature Thanks