Site stuff: More on Blogger Beta

• About labels and blog search.

Blogger launched one of its best Beta features yet this past week — a handy label (category) manager on the edit posts page. Using a drop-down menu of your labels and check boxes next to each post title, it's now simple to add and remove labels from posts. This is great, because the only way to add labels to older posts before was to bring up a post for editing, add the labels and save it again. I had done that to maybe 20 of my older posts, but I didn't like the way it was bringing them back to the top of my FeedBurner feed. The only quirk I noticed with the label manager is the "new label" feature doesn't work unless a post is selected. I've added the basic labels to all the blog's posts today, and the Jeblog's categories should be completely up to date by later today.

While my transition to Blogger Beta has been exciting, I've run into one significant problem: Google Blog Search seems to have lost my feed altogether. No posts since the switch have shown up there. That's a real bummer, because it's a major source of my traffic. I feel confident the problem isn't on my end, because posts are still popping up as normal at Technorati and in my FeedBurner feed. Blog Search support told me that, ultimately, nothing is guaranteed (gee, thanks). Anyone who can help me solve this one will earn my eternal gratitude and admiration.

// Update (11/15) // A few of the first Beta posts showed up in Google Blog Search, but no more have since then. Very strange. All other indexing is occuring as normal; I've been keeping a close eye on Technorati, Icerocket, Google and others, and pinging far more aggressively than I used to. For another take on Google Blog Search problems, see this post.

// Update (11/19) // It seems every time I post about this, something changes. Within the last few days, all the missing posts showed up in Google Blog Search, and the newest post was indexed within an hour. It may have been much sooner; I didn't look until about an hour later. So, it appears this problem may finally be resolved some six weeks after converting to Blogger Beta. Fingers crossed.