New blog, new blogger features

The last two weeks I've been stuck inside my house the majority of the time due to an encounter with the dreaded mono. I had grand plans of accomplishing things during this time off. Things I could do lying on a couch, maybe. Well, I'm mostly recovered now and not much happened. Except! There was some business I had to take care of with my old website, aorula. Specifically, removing a file I hosted. Some RPC exploit used to gain admin access to unpatched Win2k/XP boxes. Personally, I don't think the file is to blame. The person who wrote it may be evil and the people who downloaded it may have used it for shady purposes, but the file itself justs sits there until someone uses it, for good or bad.

In the process of removing the file, I realized my blogger template was messed up and all my php includes were not showing up on the front page. When I logged into to blogger, which I had not done in several months, I noticed it had been updated and taken out of beta status. Something rare for a google product, so it caught my attention. Some new blogger features I liked were the use of labels, fast blogspot publish times, and ease of setting up a new blog. I always felt like aorula was more than I wanted to maintain, having to ftp files around and track down problems on the web host's forums, and this prevented me from using it more. So I setup this new blog thinking that sheer ease of use will produce more posts. I'm also interested to see how google will further integrate their services. Already, blogger has teamed up with google reader to provide a widget you place on your blog that displays your shared reader items. Maybe in the future we'll see a google calendar widget, more with picasa web photos, or even automatically generated content based on your personalized search history.