Blogger in Draft adds more link and photo editing options

Even if I don’t particularly like the new Blogger design, there’s no doubt that’s where the new features will be added, as the old version will be eventually retired. For example, I recently noticed two new things added to the post editor, although for now only in Blogger in Draft:

First of all: the option to open links in a new window has been added as a simple check box to the ‘Edit Link’ dialog. It’s a nice small update that can save a lot of time and manual tinkering with the HTML code – and, might I add, WordPress has had this option for some time. I made a habit to have links to external sites open in a new window / tab, because this way the reader can easily return to my article after reading what I referenced. The same thing is valid for large images; overwriting content with other sites or images interrupts the visitor and causes unnecessary delays by loading the original article again when (or if) the reader returns to finish it. But if the linked sites are opened in a separate tab the reader can simply close it and return immediately where he left off.

The other update concerns images: after selecting a picture, the small strip with available actions has two additional options, ‘Edit link’ and ‘Edit image’. ‘Edit link’ does basically the same think as for non-image links, including the check-box for opening the target in a new tab or window as mentioned above. ‘Edit image’ will probably be more popular among users, because here Blogger integrated Picnik, the online photo editor already available in Picasa Web Albums. With this addition, Google is moving closer to the ideal of doing everything in the cloud: instead of saving images from the web locally to edit (cropping should be a very common action, for example) and later upload on the blog, users will be able to do that directly in the post editor. The only down-side is that Picnik is still Flash-only, so probably out of reach for mobile users. 

Personally, I use the online post editor extremely rarely, only if I’m writing from a public computer – and even then I usually prefer to use Google Docs if I don’t think I will publish the article in that session. I prefer working in Windows Live Writer any day, not only for the ease of use and offline writing, but also for the advanced options – and I’m not the only one. Not to mention that Blogger’s online editor keeps insisting on using <div>-tags instead of the more semantic <p>! I would have probably never noticed the new changes if not for someone mentioning the first on Twitter.

endlich kann man bei @Blogger auswählen, dass neue Links in einem neuen Fenster/Tab geöffnet werden :)

— Seraphime (@mdcn) October 29, 2011