How to report HTML bugs with the new post editor

We’d like to thank everyone who has been trying out the new post editor on Blogger in Draft and putting it through its paces. As many of you have noticed, the new editor handles HTML somewhat differently from the old editor, and tricks and conventions you may be used to are not working or screwing up your post’s formatting.

We would like to fix as many inconsistencies and problems as we can before we unleash the new editor on all Blogger users, so we’d really appreciate reproducible bug reports when you see a problem.

The three key pieces of a helpful bug report are:

• “I typed/clicked/did…”
• “I expected to see…”
• “What I really saw was…”

For example:

My post template is:

<span id="fullpost">
Full post
</span>

I opened up a new post in Firefox on XP and typed two paragraphs in Compose mode. When I switched back to Edit HTML, I expected to see:

<span id="fullpost">

First paragraph

Second paragraph

</span>

But what I saw was:

<span id="fullpost">
First paragraph</span>


<span id="fullpost">
Second paragraph</span>

Comments on this post are a fine place for these bug reports, or, if you post them on a blog, just link to them from the comments.

We realize that writing about HTML can be tricky in the post editor or the comments form. You can replace “<” with “&lt;” or put a space right after the “<” to prevent the editor from treating it as HTML. Or, if you make the post with the new editor, you can turn on “Show HTML literally” in the Compose Settings section of the Post Options.

While we can’t commit to making the new editor work exactly like the old in every regard (if we did, that might break some of the new useful features, such as drag-and-drop image placement), we really want to keep the differences down to as few as possible. Your feedback and bug reports will make this possible.

Thanks in advance!

Updates and Bug Fixes for June 26th

Today’s Blogger release is a big one for Blogger in Draft. Let’s lead off with the quick stuff:

• Google Gadget integration continues to improve, with better editing of gadget preferences.


• The new look for the Dashboard has seen a handful of tweaks, including a new button style that we’re trying out and, by popular demand, the “show all blogs” toggle is now sticky.


• The subscribe page element has been published to WWW.


• We’ve added a “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” to the Blogger in Draft dashboard, so now you don’t have to remember to type “draft.blogger.com” instead of “www.blogger.com.”


• So you can easily keep up with the news, we’ve added this blog as a tab on the Blogger in Draft Dashboard.

But that’s not what you came here for. You wanted this:

• Webmaster Tools Verification. Turn this on to automatically add and verify all your blogs on Google’s Webmaster Tools.


• Star ratings. Add a 0–5 star rating control to the bottom of your posts so that your readers can rate them.


• Import / export of blogs. Back up all of your posts and comments to one Atom XML file on your computer, and import your posts from one blog to another.


• Embedded comment form. By incredibly popular demand, we’ve brought the comment form to your blog’s post pages, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.


• New post editor. We’ve completely revised the post editor, bringing in drag-and-drop image placement and better HTML handling.

As always, these features are on Blogger in Draft because we’re not done with them and we’re looking for your feedback. Please read the posts for each of the features before trying them so that you know what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure you leave comments! These are big features for us, so we want to get them right before we turn them on for everyone.