Googlified

Blogger in Draft recently released two new features, Blog List and Scheduled Posts.

Blog List is a bit more than an ordinary blog roll you see on most blogs. Not only that it can display “a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon,” but it can also “show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post” if the blog you link to has a RSS or Atom feed. You can find this under Add a New Element in Layout.

Another new feature, Scheduled Posts, lets Blogger users to schedule when to publish a saved post in a set future time (that’s before Dec. 31, 9999).

Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.

I played with this feature a little bit and found two minor problems: 1) they only display the year in two digits, which is not a really huge deal today but it could be a bit confusing sometimes (see above, one is 1999 and the other is 2099) and, 2) sort of related to number 1, when you enter the scheduled date, the year is in two digits. If I am to enter “99″ it’s set to 1999, but if I enter “08″ it will be 2008. A date chooser will probably help, a lot.

Y2K called, they want their bugs back. :)