Beta

I'm switching to the new Beta version of Blogger. If you get surprised by some formatting issues, now you know the reason.

POSTSCRIPT: Well, that was interesting.

I think I've more or less got back to where I want to be, give or take a few small formatting tweaks. Here are a few comments for anybody else out there who's thinking of trying it.

Pros:
• The ability to label (categorize) posts. It will take some work to go back and categorize all the old ones, but it's a nice feature.
• A slicker 'Archive' widget (see sidebar).
• The ability to easily add an RSS feed from another source into your blog, which I have taken advantage of to get rid of some clumsy JavaScript that I was using. See Latest Doping News in the sidebar, and e-mail me if you are interested in the details of what I did. It's still a bit screwy at the moment but should iron itself out with time.
• Greater ease of customization, e.g. more transparent management of link lists etc.
• The new Blogger also provides an Atom feed of post comments. I am not making that available, see below.

Cons:
• First, if you want to take advantage of any of the above, you'll need to discard your old Blogger template, including any customizations you have made. That takes some time, but is not difficult for the most part.
• However, if you don't want to use Blogger's comments, you've got some work ahead of you. I think I've managed it for HaloScan so e-mail me if you need a hand.
• I also had a bit of trouble with the StatCounter code so if you use that I might also be able to help.
• The new templates are quite a lot more difficult to decipher if you want to do something non-standard using the Edit HTML method. But hey, hacking wouldn't be fun if it was easy!

Verdict: If you're offered the chance to switch to Beta, and the only template modifications you've made are your link lists, and if you're willing to add each one of those links by hand into the new widget, then I'd say go for it. Otherwise, don't do it unless you feel pretty good about your Markup Language skills.