Beta = the crappy version no one wants to use

Usually I'm a fan of the beta versions of things because it lets you try out new stuff before anyone else. Case in point, Google Mail. Love it. Picasa and Picasa Web. Fan-f'ing-tastic.

But you have to assume before "they" release something in beta they have incorporated all the fundamental functionalities by that time and only have little bugs to work out, right? Not so with Blogger. This beta version is crap. It's like the Fischer Price version of Blogger. They took out all the functionality and tried to "dummy-proof" it.

Every time I turn around there's another problem with Blogger Beta. First thing I noticed was that I suddenly couldn't leave comments on my friends' blogs that hadn't been migrated to Blogger Beta. Boo. Who at Blogger thought segregation was a good idea? Next, even though my blogger address didn't change, my RSS feed did. It might have been nice to have been warned about that so that I could update my readers about the change. Now I find out that my StatCounter has not been tracking any visitors since I migrated to the new template. Sounds like a simple fix would be to reinstall the code in my new template... wrong again. In their attempts to make template editing easy enough for the masses, they've removed any possible way for me to add in the StatCounter code. Wait, that's a lie... you can add the code, but it can't be in HTML... I don't know what to convert it to, and I don't know how to convert the code even if I did know which they are using.

Gah. The worst part is, there's no going back.

I really expected better from the folks over at Google. They've never let me down before. Boo-urns.