Just a little bit impressed with the blogroll feature

The new Blogger is supposed to let users make changes to their templates without having to hard-code HTML. If you don't know what that means, then this new Blogger is supposed to be for you.

Trouble is, one of the big problems Blogger users face is that adding and maintaining a blogroll is a major endeavor. Either the blogger hand codes all those links, or they use a third-party service like Blogrolling.com, which still requires cut and past of code inside a page template.

The new beta is touted as allowing users to make all sorts of changes without having to directly type or cut-and-paste html.

And that's true.

But not as easily as some other systems. Word Press, for example, has a "Link It" script users can drag onto their browser menu bar and click it to add sites to an integrated blogroll. With Blogger's new system, you have to add a new page element, chose the "links" feature, then manually add the site's name and URL. And trust me, it's easy to add seven or eight links then mistakenly close the window thinking you've actually permanently added the links, when in fact there's a final "save" button to click. Bummer.

Don't get me wrong. It's an improvement, as are most of the changes. But it seems to me that Blogger is at least two years behind the curve, because I saw similar drag-and-click functionality out of Six Apart's TypePad, which isn't free like Blogger or even WordPress.com or Blog Peoria for that matter.