Blogger Beta - oh hell......

Today I upgraded Fictions to Blogger Beta.
I really should have known better.

Now those of you following this long and frankly dull story of my adventures in weblogging (see the category page on weblogging for details - here) will realise that I've spent far too much time on messing around with the structure of the blog already.

Nothing has eaten away at my time more than the search to get Categories onto my bloody blog.
The basic idea is that every post has a topic / category / tag / label. You can then search using these categories. So if you want to read everything I have to say about comics you'll be able to click on the comics category and see them all.

Blogger originally didn't do categories.
Which was a real pain.
So many people have developed many hacks and codes to get round this.
I tried using Blog search. Didn't work properly.
So then I stumbled upon the brilliant method I use now where I manually put all the posts onto a cross referenced categories page.
It works for me. (I got it from here and here, thanks guys.)

So all my categories are now on the sidebar, looking lovely and working well.

But Blogger Beta offers inbuilt categories. It calls them labels, but they are categories proper.
It was just too tempting.
So I changed over.

What they didn't tell you was that to use Labels in Blogger Beta, you have to use Layout in Blogger Beta. And to use Layout you can't use your CSS / HTML Template.
I've spent ages getting the template just right, tweaking everything until the blog looks bloody lovely and does everything I want it to.

So, after all that work, I'm not prepared to ditch my template.
So I'm going to use Blogger Beta, but I'm not going to be using labels, I'll be using the manual method and updating my template by hand.
Blogger are promising that you will be able to edit you template directly AND use labels at some point - But when??????

You can all wake up now.