Painful transition to New Blogger (4)

Your indulgence, dear reader(s). I've just spent most of the evening trying to get the much-touted new Blogger to work. I waited until Blogger kicked me off the old version, correctly anticipating that there would be many bugs in the new one for some time after it was made available. But even so, the new Blogger first displays a blank editing frame when I try to edit an existing post. The official help section suggests that I switch from my Opera browser to IE6 or Firefox. The Blogger technical people seem to look down their noses at anyone not using Firefox, but last time I checked Firefox it seemed too big for my machine. So, I download and install IE6, which takes the best part of an hour (and incidentally wipes out all bookmarks from IE5: nice going, Bill). Lo and behold, I can't even log in to Blogger with IE6. After fiddling unsuccessfully with cookie settings and the like for a while, I see that some fellow-user in the indispensable Google "Blogger victim support group" suggests that you can work around the mysterious "IE6 login problem" by logging in under your old Blogger account—even though this has supposedly just been deactivated—and then entering the new account login information when you are prompted to do so. This does, indeed, work for me, at least until they decide to eliminate the old Blogger account altogether in the interests of further progress. This is what Blogger calls a version that is "out of beta"??

Meanwhile, back in Opera, I realise that the editing screen comes back if you switch to HTML editing from Wysiwyg. But a post composed in this way then simply vanishes except for the title . . .

For all this trouble, the user does not see that much improvement in the form of offered features. The most useful new option from my point of view is to add labels to one's posts so that posts on a single subject can be conveniently grouped together; but surely this sort of thing did not require revamping the entire Blogger interface. Meanwhile, the most significant missing feature in the original version of Blogger—some way of posting true extendable post summaries—is still missing. The suggested way of working around this, which involves switching off the display of part of one's post in the version shown on the blog's home page, is quite unsatisfactory, because the entire post still has to download into the browser before the browser decides not to display it. (You can see the hidden text by viewing the source code.) The hidden text might easily therefore take up more bandwidth than the material being displayed, producing a very slow-loading blog. ("Gates of Vienna", for example, may be suffering from this problem.) A more efficient alternative is to set up two parallel blogs (as I am trying at this site, and "EU Referendum", e.g., has been doing for some time) with links between the summary (blog 1) and the long form of the post (blog 2) for each post. One should then presumably switch off the comments in either blog 1 or blog 2, since one doesn't want two independent sets of comments on the same post. The links between the two versions of each post have to be set up manually, as far as I know.