all systems blue

so blogger has a new backend, and in the name of science, I thought I'd give it a shot and see what the big deal was.

I'd already had the chance to play around with it to some degree when designing Elections Insider and I didn't really like what I saw; it took the previous notion of "design your page, and then inject our code" and replaced it with "ground-up solution! hoo-ah!" which makes some things easier, but makes most personalization harder, especially with the weird live colour preview system which isn't documented and requires a little bit of reverse-engineering if you want to add any variables of your own.

It did keep a copy of the (admittedly stale) scrapheap design so I can switch back if I want, but for the time being I'll probably keep poking at the thing and reporting back.