Things I want for Christmas from Blogger

I’ve been using Blogger to power this blog for more than two years now, and whilst the frills have become nicer, the core functionality provided hasn’t changed much in that time (except for comments! yay comments!), which indicates (to me at least) that it’s pretty good. In which case, we need better frills. Herewith some frills that I’d like:

  • Per-post comment feeds. Currently I generate these for my blog (for my own consumption) by checking file modifications and scraping the HTML files. Yuck.
  • Recent comments feed/page, like the ones Flickr provide
  • Comments I recently left feed/page, like the ones Flickr provide (this is invaluable for keeping track of conversations on Flickr – obviously it would only work for Blogger sites, but it’s a start – there’s no reason Typekey couldn’t also do this)
  • Better post previewing using my actual blog template please. If I use an inline style I want to check that it doesn’t conflict with anything else and my images float where I expect them to float, thanks.
  • The return of per-user stats. They don’t even have to be on-demand dynamic. Just generated once a week would do. The fact that a users’ Blogger profile page represents their profile as of about two months ago is genuinely worse than no profile page at all.
  • Don’t scrap the archive index page! Dear god please! Just because there’s a template tag to include links to all my archives on my front page doesn’t mean I want to! I have something like 28 months worth of archives – what if I wanted to display these weekly? A 112-item long list on each and every page of my weblog? Yeah, because that would be worth it. What it really means is that I now have to maintain my archive index page by hand 🙁

These are just the things which spring to mind. Does anyone reading this use Blogger and have something they’d like adding/changing/fixing? Official support for some of the Firefox Blogger extensions like the Google Toolbar maybe?

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