The new Blogger.com — an ugly duckling?

The blogging platform Blogger relaunched this week with a new look 
 and new features, and drew praise in Adam Javůrek's post 
 A new and better Blogger.com! and Radek Hulán's
 Blogger.com — a great system from Google!. My experience
 with the new features in Blogger has been a lot worse. Blogger is the blogging and publishing platform 
 Dagblog runs on.

Since Monday, Blogger has put me through several anxious moments and cost me a lot of time. The much-praised 
 features such as comments and per-post archives are more of a nightmare. But let's take them one at a time.

Archive page
 
 Blogger used to have a template for defining an archive page. The archive page could contain links to 
 older posts grouped by day, week or month. The new Blogger should still have this option (screenshot),
 but for reasons I can't fathom, it doesn't appear in the publishing interface. 
 That leaves no way to set the template and create an archive page.
 
 Per-post archives
 
 Each post gets its own page with a URL in the form http://xyz/rok/mesic/titulek-příspěvku. 
 Per-post archiving has several drawbacks and can fortunately be turned off. 
 The biggest problem is duplication, since a post appears in the archive and also
 has its own page. Another drawback is that the page name comes from the post title. The people who built it apparently 
 didn't think anyone would write titles in a language other than English. For the title 
 “Dobrá rada nad zlato: vylepšujeme kód” (“Good advice is worth more than gold: improving the code”), it generates the page 
 dobr-rada-nad-zlato-vylepujeme-kd-vte.html. Another drawback is the huge number of files Blogger generates
 and uploads over FTP when you republish. Dagblog has around 240 posts, so it generates 240 files, 
 and that doesn't count the archives I mentioned under duplication. Republishing took about 45 minutes. 
 
 Comments
 
 The first big disappointment is that only posts published through the new interface have comments. 
 Older posts simply lack them. Maybe the problem is in Dagblog's main template, but 
 for all my efforts, unlike Jirka Hradil
, I couldn't get it to work. Another drawback is the way commenting works. Unless you're a registered Blogger user, 
 you can only comment anonymously, with no way to enter a name, email address or website. Comments are 
 tied to per-post archives. If you want to use comments, you have to turn on
 per-post archiving.

On the other hand, Blogger introduced new design templates (you're looking at one right now), profiles and 
 other little changes, including a new web interface. My own feelings are mixed. 
 Clearly a lot of work went into Blogger, and features that were missing 
 such as comments, post management and previews are in place. At the same time, some features feel unfinished, 
 as if the developers are waiting for users to weigh in.