The next version of Blogger

I was home sick yesterday and thought to myself that since I was pretty much immobilized that this would be a good time to switch to Wordpress. I looked at AKMA's new blog and I really like his template and went looking around for some other templates I liked.

That is when I realized why I don't like WordPress. It is the themes. I am finding that sites like Adam Cleaveland and AKMA's site are the exceptions and many, many WordPress themes compete with the content rather than let the content shine. The minimalistic themes that I like seem to have been used over at Wordpress.com so I would have a theme just like everyone elses.

I installed MovableType 4.x the other day and while I liked it, it is a lot harder to use than it needs to be. I can't believe that blogroll support was not included and has to be added via a plugin. Also, Windows Live Writer does not work with Movable Type for some reason. I suppose I am looking for a Typepad type version which SA is smart enough not to do because everyone would host Typepad themselves which would cannibalize their revenues. I did try out a free trial of Typepad and I do like it but then I am paying to host my site at Typepad and then also some hosting for Resonate as well on a different site which makes little sense. Although importing 8000+ posts into WordPress is easy but rather difficult into Typepad or MT. If anyone has an easy solution for this, I think I would switch.

In the end I am still using Blogger and here are a couple of features I would love to see for those of us who use FTP and host our blogs ourselves.

• Integration with Google Sitemaps. I know it can use my RSS feed to update with but there has to be a better solution for our old content. The publication of a complete sitemap of our blog content would be wonderful, even if the file was stored on Google's servers.
• A separate archives and labels page. This way people could browse our labels and archives easier and we could even move our listing of archives off our main page if we so desire. Actually Blogger used to do this and it is a feature I would love back.
• Some new templates please. If Yahoo! 360 has more template options, something is wrong. In the Pyra days you had design competitions. Do one again and involve the Blogger and design community. You may be surprised.
• Integration with del.icio.us: I don't know who started this feud but it would be great if my contextless links could be posted daily via del.icio.us. While you are at it, could you get together with some of your old coworkers at Obvious and work out some cool inline Twitter integration as well.
• Can you please enable labels of longer then 100 posts. When Blogger publishes it republishes almost all of my categories anyways. Why not have it publish less unchanged pages and update a couple of current pages. Limit each label to 100 posts on a page but simple do the "previous" link to older labels.