Blogger Buzz

Coming up Next...

2009-11-10T09:33:00.000-08:00

by Helen Kang, Software Engineer, Blogger

Some of you must have wondered what the Next Blog link on the NavBar does, and clicked on the link once or twice. Next Blog used to take you to a random blog, written by a random blogger. Your fellow blogger could have been writing her blog in a language that you don't know how to read. Or you might be someone who likes to read about food and restaurants in Germany, but your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog.

We've made the Next Blog link more useful, by taking you to a blog that you might like. The new and improved Next Blog link will now take you to a blog with similar content, in a language that you understand. If you are reading a Spanish blog about food, the Next Blog link will likely take you to another blog about food. In Spanish!

You might discover a cool blogger who has hobbies similar to yours, has similar taste in electronic gadgets, likes sports that you're into, or has similar curiosities and interests. We will finish rolling out the new and improved Next Blog link over the next week and hope that you will enjoy discovering blogs that are likely to interest you.

This has been a fun, collaborative effort on the Blogger team and we've enjoyed the support we received from other Google teams. We really hope you enjoy the new, more relevant Next Blog as much as we do.

Blogger in Your Own Words

2009-11-06T16:40:00.000-08:00

Last week we asked you for a few words to describe both the Blogger of the present and the Blogger you'd like to see in the future. You responded overwhelmingly, and now as promised we'd like to share the unedited results with you:

Blogger Today

(click for large version)

Blogger in the Future

(click for large version)

Thanks to everyone who pitched in their two cents; we're very excited to take your words and start writing the next chapter of Blogger.

(And of course thanks to Wordle for the awesome word clouds!)

Improving Our Communication of Blogger Service Interruptions

2009-11-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

By Eddie Kessler, Blogger Engineering Manager

After a recent service interruption, we started talking about how we could improve our communications about these (hopefully infrequent) issues. Going forward, in the case of significant service interruptions, we plan to publish a post mortem on the Blogger Status blog within 3 business days to provide details about what went wrong and what we're doing to help prevent similar problems in the future.

During any outage, we try to keep the Blogger Status blog updated once we know about an issue. Of course sometimes — as was the case on Saturday — affected users who cannot reach Blogger cannot reach the Status blog either. In such cases, we will try to post updates on the Blogger account on Twitter to keep users apprised of what we know and when we expect a resolution.

We don't like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we're doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you. As always, thank you for using Blogger.

New Transparent Navbar Styles

2009-10-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger

As a blog author, you've probably spent more than a little time getting exactly the right "look" for your blog. A blog is an outlet for creative expression, and how your blog looks says as much about you as what is written on it. And we at Blogger are committed to giving you the tools to make a great-looking blog.

The Blog*Spot navigation bar ("navbar") is one area where we realized that there was some room for improvement. Our four traditional color scheme choices — Blue, Black, Tan, and Silver — are somewhat limited, especially if your blog's background color is lime green or hot pink.

That's why we have added two new color schemes — "Transparent Light" and "Transparent Dark." These new color schemes take advantage of the ability of modern browsers to render transparency (a technique known to web designers as "alpha blending"). This allows the navbar background to blend together with your blog's background color and pattern. The "Transparent Light" color scheme has a semi-transparent white background, producing subtle pastel colors, while the background of "Transparent Dark" is a semi-transparent black that produces a shaded look.

In addition, we've simplified and slimmed down the look of all the navbars, so that they will be more likely to harmonize with the aesthetics of your blog.

To enable the Transparent Light or the Transparent Dark navbar, go to Layout | Page Elements, then click Edit next to the navbar widget:

We had a lot of fun adding this feature and hope you like it too. Try it out!

The Next Chapter

2009-10-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

As we close the chapter on the first ten years over here on Blogger, the team couldn't be more excited about the possibilities that lie ahead over the next ten. And while we've got some great things planned already, we know that the ideas and passion of the Blogger community will inspire us further. So in that spirit, we're going to once again ask for some help writing out the next chapter of Blogger. Only this time, we mean it quite literally :-)

We'd like you to take a second to think about where Blogger is today, and then where you'd like to see it in the future. What are some words that come to mind? How would you describe it?

Specifically, we're looking for six adjectives—three to describe the present, and three to describe hopes for the future. And when you've come up with them, please take a second to let us know what you are thinking. Once we've heard what everyone has to say, we'll follow-up here to share the results.

Once again, we really do appreciate your words!

Blog Action Day 2009

2009-10-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Robin Beck, Blog Action Day

This is Robin Beck here from Blog Action Day central, and I want to thank Rick and the Blogger team for helping support Blog Action Day 2009.

For those of you who don’t know, Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15th where bloggers across the world unite to write about a single issue on a single day. We like to think of it as one big blogfest for good, and our goal is to spark conversation on an issue of importance across the web.

This year’s topic is climate change, and we’ve thus far had more than 4,000 bloggers from 123 countries register, including many of the world’s largest blogs.

Our aim is to make Blog Action Day 2009 the largest social change event on the web as a demonstration of global concern about the climate crisis. To achieve this, we want to invite the entire Blogger community to get involved and commit to writing a single post about climate change on your blog on October 15th.

You can register your blog here.

In addition to joining thousands of other bloggers, you’ll also be supporting the work of the dozens of leading nonprofits who are also participating – including Oxfam, 350.org, The Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, The United Nations Foundation, and more than forty organizations affiliated with the TckTckTck campaign.

You can learn more about the issue of climate change and see sample topics you might write about at www.blogactionday.org. There you can also find additional ways to get involved by taking action with leading nonprofits and posting a snazzy widget to your blog.

Thanks so much for your support – we hope to have you all as part of the event!

Keeping Your Blog Secure

2009-10-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

While October is to many a month of candy and costumes, it also happens to be National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the U.S. In that spirit, we thought we'd take a minute to look at a few different things you can do to make sure both your content and account are secure on Blogger.

Third Party Code

Adding site counters, templates, and other third-party code to your blog can be a great way to add some flare to your content, but can also leave your blog vulnerable to malicious activity if you aren't familiar with its source.

Over the years we've seen a number of third party scripts disguise themselves as helpful add-ons, when in fact they are performing a malicious operation behind the scenes. For example, a site counter widget may indeed be providing your blog with helpful tracking data, but at the same time may also be discreetly sending that information to advertisers for the purpose of collecting the online habits of your readers. A blog template you downloaded from a third party site might include pop-up ads or links to dangerous sites that install malware on visitor's computers.

The good news though is that most of the add-ons you will run across are perfectly legitimate. To protect yourself from the small minority of add-ons that are nefarious, we've put together a few tips to keep in mind when adding third party code to your blog:

Take a moment to review the code and look for anything that seems out of place. For example, if you are adding a weather gadget to your blog and notice in the code that there are links pointing to unrelated sites, take that as a red flag and keep searching for another weather gadget. There is no reason that a weather gadget should include a snippet like <a href="http://completelyfreemoney.com">Make Money Online!</a>

Before saving new template code, always preview first. Malicious template designers may sometimes include pop-ups or other unexpected ads in the template code, which will usually be revealed with a quick preview. If anything unexpected shows up in the preview, go ahead and discard the new code by clicking Clear Edits.

Backup your template! Whenever making significant changes to your blog's template, it's always a good idea to backup your content beforehand just in case you need to reverse changes.

You can easily do this from the Layout | Edit HTML tab by clicking the Download Full Template link and saving the .XML file to your hard drive. You'll then be able to revert back to this downloaded version by clicking the Upload button, also right under the Layout | Edit HTML tab.

Look first to 'trusted' code repositories for a new template or widget. There are probably thousands of places across the web where you can find widget and template code, but it may be helpful to first check out some of the more widely known and trusted sources.

For templates, we've actually done a bit of scouting work already and collected a handful of great resources laid out in this Buzz post from earlier in the year. That collection comes from a number of well-established designers, and should provide plenty of secure template options to dig though.

For widgets and other scripts, there are a handful of places worth your time. Mashable's 50 Great Widgets for Your Blog is a very nice compilation that covers a broad range of categories. Widgetbox is another great portal to countless widget creations, all organized into easily browseable categories. Finally, Blogger's own Gadget Directory has hundreds of gadgets to look through. Simply click the Add a Gadget link under the Layout | Page Elements tab to access them all.

Permissions

Finally we thought it's worth touching on another security area which has proven problematic for some bloggers in the past, and that is your blog's Permissions settings.

Almost every day our support team receives reports from users who've been locked out of their own blog, the result of giving admin privileges to an unfamiliar blogger. Remember, you can always add more authors to your blog, but only extend admin privileges if you absolutely trust the person.

For more information about National Cyber Security Awareness Month, please check the StaySafeOnline.org page as well as the security series on the Official Google blog.

Post to Blogger with Google Sidewiki

2009-10-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

Last week, Google Sidewiki launched to the world as an entirely new way to share information across the web. This new Google Toolbar feature allows you to contribute your own insight to any webpage, as well as read information shared by others right in your browser's sidebar.

Google Sidewiki uses a special relevancy algorithm to display the most helpful entries first, and also has built-in technology to display your entries on other sites which contain the same snippet of text. For a more in-depth look at how it all works, as well as a full overview of all the features that Google Sidewiki has to offer, the team put together a very helpful page which you can check out here.

One feature in particular did catch our attention here on the Blogger team, and that is the ability to post your Google Sidewiki entires directly to your blog. You can watch a quick video tutorial of how it all works below:

So if you haven't already, download the Google Toolbar and give Sidewiki a try. As you come up with new ideas, submit them on the Sidewiki product ideas page!

Bloggers wanted!

2009-09-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

Have opinions about Blogger? If so, we'd like to meet you. We are looking for participants willing to document their blogging practices over a few weeks and answer some interview questions. This will help us better understand your needs and keep improving Blogger.

Interested? Sign up here.

Thanks!

Show your face!

2009-09-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

by Lu Chen, Blogger Summer Intern (Philadelphia, PA)

Last October we launched a comments feature that let you embed comments and the commenting form below your blog posts.

Today we have extended embedded comments to display profile images next to the comments that your visitors write. Though profile images have been available with the other commenting options, we are happy to bring them to embedded comments as part of the Blogger Birthday feature series.

We've also made it much easier to upload a profile photo when you leave a comment on a Blogger blog. From the comment preview, click "Add photo" to upload a photo to your Blogger profile. The next time you comment on a Blogger blog, your profile photo will be displayed next to your comment.

To enable or disable profile images in your blog's comments, go to Settings | Comments.

Cheers to photo-filled comments!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Turn Your Blog into a Book with Blog2Print

2009-09-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Caroline Vanderlip, SharedBook CEO

To continue Blogger's 10th anniversary celebration, I’m delighted to announce that Blog2Print has now partnered with Blogger. Blog2Print lets you publish some or all of your posts and photos as a professionally-printed, full-color book. Since 2007, thousands of Blogger users have become Blog2Print fans, using our easy and quick service to save and share all their favorite writings with friends and family or to keep a hard-copy version of their work. You can make books by season, by year, by event or even by theme, and you can choose from soft cover or hard cover versions of your book.

Your book from Blog2Print.com can include selected comments from your posts, and you can also add your own additional photos and new comments as you edit your book to make a unique edition for posterity.

Blog2Print is easy to use – just enter your blog URL, select the date range for the posts you’d like to include, and choose a cover from among the nine choices. You can add an optional dedication, and then click to produce your book. A table of contents will be generated automatically, and in a few seconds you’ll see a preview of exactly what your finished book will look like.

Best of all, Blog2Print books start at only $14.95 for a soft cover book. The base price includes 20 pages, but you can add as many pages as you like – just 35 cents each.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Widgetbox: Make a Widget From Your Blog

2009-09-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Will Price, CEO of Widgetbox

In honor of Blogger’s 10 birthday, all of us at Widgetbox are excited to announce a partnership with Blogger that allows you to quickly and easily turn your blog into a widget. Whether you want to add your blog’s headlines to your main website, let your fans showcase your content to their audience, or you want a widget that helps make your content more discoverable across the web, Widgetbox-powered widgets will help you get the most visibility for your content, while eliminating the need for any manual updating or management.

For example, the Blogger Buzz widget below was made in seconds and includes posts, images, and Blogger Buzz branding:

Key Benefits?

The easiest way to build a widget from your blog
Colorful, interactive, and engaging
Easy to add to Blogger and sites across the web
As you update your blog, the widget automatically updates with the latest posts, headlines, and images
Helps you reach new readers and drive traffic back to your blog

How Do You Build Your Widget?

Building a widget with Widgetbox is simple, easy, and fun. Simply:

Enter your blog feed
Design your widget’s look and feel
Publish the widget
Add it to your site and watch it spread across the web
Access statistics on unique views, widget installs, and other blogs and domains that have installed your widget

Tens of thousands of Blogger users have already made a widget from their blog on Widgetbox. Take your blog feed, make it into a widget, and share it with everyone. It’s that easy!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

It's a date!

2009-09-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

by Ross Peter Nelson, Software Engineer, Google Calendar

Do you have an event you'd like to invite your readers to? Thanks to Blogger Gadgets, this is now a piece of cake. Click the Customize link in the toolbar, and go to the Layout tab. There, you'll see the Add a Gadget link. The Event Gadget is currently one of the featured gadgets, or you can add it directly by clicking "add your own" and entering the URL http://www.google.com/ig/modules/calendar/socialevent/bloggerevent.xml. You'll then be taken to a configuration page that lets you enter information about your event. Once you click Save, it will be visible on your blog for everyone to see.

The gadget allows your readers to indicate whether they are going to attend the event, and lets them see which of their FriendConnect friends will be there too. In addition, anyone with a Google Calendar account can simply click a link to have that event added to their Google Calendar.

You can add multiple events to your blog as long as you give each one a different title or ID, and we'll keep track of who's attending which one.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

You Might As Well Jump!

2009-09-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

by Sean McCullough, Software Engineer, Blogger

It's time to announce another Blogger Birthday feature! Many users have been asking for an easy way to implement "Read more" links on their blog's index page. In fact, for years bloggers have been implementing "Read more" jump breaks themselves by manually editing their HTML --- a process that was complicated and error prone.

Today we are excited to announce our latest birthday present: Jump Breaks.

With Jump Breaks you can show just a snippet of your post on your blog's index page. Blogger will insert a "Read more" link to the full post page where your readers can keep reading.

There are a couple of ways to insert a "Read more" jump to your posts. If you use the new post editor (available on Blogger in Draft, or by enabling it via the Settings tab), you'll notice the "Insert jump break" icon in the editor's toolbar. Click this icon and the "jump break" will be inserted into your blog post at your cursor's position.

If you don't use the new post editor, you can still insert a jump break in Edit HTML mode by adding <!-- more --> where you want to position the jump break.

Want to change the "Read more" text to something more your style? No problem. You can edit the "Read more" text by clicking Layout and then Edit the Blog Posts widget.

One more note, the Jump Break feature does not change how your post appears in your feed. You can configure post feed options by going to Settings | Basic | Site Feed, and editing Allow Blog Feeds.

Update: Users that have customized their Blog Posts widget or otherwise have highly customized templates: You may need to edit your HTML to enable Jump Breaks. First, back up your template, then follow the instructions at the bottom of this help article.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Earn Charity Donations on Blogger with SocialVibe

2009-09-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Guest Post
by Joe Marchese, SocialVibe CEO

In honor of Blogger's 10th anniversary, we are excited to announce that you can now use your blogs to create positive, measurable social change. By adding the SocialVibe gadget to your blog, you'll be turning brand dollars into real charitable donations for the cause of your choice. The World Wildlife Foundation, Nature Conservancy, DonorsChoose, Invisible Children, and Charity:Water are just a few of the great charities you can support on Blogger.

Once you install the SocialVibe sidebar gadget on your blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the gadget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip). You can switch your cause and sponsor as often as you like, and receive regular updates from your charity about goal progress and impact. Thus far, SocialVibe has been able to raise over $500,000 for charities, and we know the Blogger community will be able to significantly increase this amount. In fact, we are setting a goal for the community to raise $50,000 before the end of the year (and remember, you don't raise money by taking money out of your pocket—or your audience's—but rather by getting your readers to engage with your SocialVibe gadget).

Adding the gadget is easy. Here's the low-down on how you can use your blog to make a big impact:

Step 1 - Add the Gadget

From your Blogger dashboard, click the Layout tab. Then, click the Add a Gadget link and click on "Featured", then select SocialVibe. (If you don't see it in the Featured gallery, follow this link, or click "Add your own". In the textbox, add the URL http://www.socialvibe.com/s/blogger/gadget.)

Step 2 - Configure Gadget
Here's the fun part. Choose the cause you want to support from the drop-down list. If you want to customize the size and title, you can do that here as well, and you'll see a preview of your gadget underneath. When you're satisfied, click Save.

Congratulations, your gadget has now been added to your blog! Your readers can help you earn for your cause by engaging with your gadget, and will even have the chance to leave you comments and add a SocialVibe gadget to their own blog.

The yellow overlay you see on your gadget is only viewable by you, the blog owner. Click on the link in the overlay to create a SocialVibe.com account and earn even more charity donations by adding it to other networks such as Facebook, MySpace or WordPress.

With SocialVibe, the Blogger community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world. Never before has making a positive social impact online been this easy.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

There's an app for that!

2009-09-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

We're very happy to announce today that Blogger now has a home on the iPhone. The team behind BlogPress (a popular app already available in the iPhone App Store) decided to build a free version of BlogPress just for Blogger users to celebrate Blogger's 10th birthday. BlogPress Lite packs many of the great Blogger features you have come to know into a simple yet powerful mobile application for blogging on the go.

Rich-text WYSIWYG editing, image uploads, labels, configurable settings, and auto-save are among the many features that are part of BlogPress Lite, as well as a handful of other optimizations for the iPhone experience. Landscape editing mode is supported and will feel very familiar for iPhone users, and blog posts are automatically saved when you have an incoming call—you won't have to ever worry about losing a post.

We're grateful to the team at InfoThinker for adding to the birthday "party." The app has been submitted to the App Store and should be available shortly. (We'll update this post when we see it.)

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Share from Nav Bar

2009-08-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger (Mountain View, CA)

It's fitting that our newest birthday present was announced first on Twitter. Starting yesterday, the Blogger Navbar includes a new button: "Share."

When your readers are on your blog's home page, they can click "Share" to post the blog's URL to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. If they navigate directly to an individual blog post, clicking "Share" in the navbar also lets them share the post by email.

We've already seen some nice adoption of this new feature and hope this helps you build out your audience and share your story with the world. Here's a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you're using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you're getting from each source.

On the other hand, if you're interested in seeing which blogs people are sharing, head on over to Twitter search and you can watch as people share blogs and posts that they like. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter while you're there!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Let the Music Play

2009-08-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, a number of our users complained about their experience on the receiving end of a DMCA complaint. Much commentary at the time focused on claims that we were removing blog posts at the behest of music labels, that we were not notifying users, and that we weren't providing users with any recourse if they were linking to the music with permission. Though we noted at the time that we hadn't changed anything and were still following our documented policy, we realized that there was room for improvement. Over the next several months, we talked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ChillingEffects.org, and reached out to a number of users to find out what they'd like to see in our policy moving forward. We're happy to make those changes our latest birthday present for our users.

First, a quick review: the DMCA is a U.S. law that says that a copyright holder (a music label, for example) can notify services like Blogger if they see cases where their content is being used without permission. Once we're notified by the music label and we believe the claim to be valid, we are then obligated to remove the content—otherwise we could be found liable for its continued use. Up until today, when we received a DMCA complaint, we would send an e-mail to the owner of the blog, forward a copy of the complaint (usually a fax) to ChillingEffects.org (more about Chilling Effects here), and delete the post.

There were several problems: first, some of our bloggers hadn't updated their e-mail addresses in years (Blogger's been around a while!). Second, ChillingEffects.org needed to review the faxes we sent to ensure that they weren't inadvertently publishing personal info, sometimes causing lengthy delays in the publication of the complaint. This meant that the blogger couldn't see the substance of the complaint—often for months. Finally, the post was gone! Posts that contained dozens, even hundreds, of links were removed from the Internet because of one link, and often the blogger didn't know the link wasn't acceptable.

Starting today, we've changed how we handle these situations:

DMCA Complaints are handled via a web form. This form makes data intake easier, and makes it possible for us to share information with ChillingEffects.org without passing along personally identifiable information. It also allows us to notify affected bloggers more efficiently, as we provide information on not only the blog post in question but also the actual link(s) at issue.
Complaints are sent to ChillingEffects.org automatically. ChillingEffects.org will have a copy of the complaint soon after Blogger receives it, making it possible for the blogger to find the complaint by searching for their blog's URL at ChillingEffects.org.
Blogger notifies affected users through their dashboard as well as by e-mail. While we hope all of our users keep their e-mail addresses current so we can notify them in case there's anything important (hint, hint), we also went further by putting a big status message at the top of their dashboard to let them know about the DMCA complaint.
Blog posts are reset to draft status and are not deleted. Now that users have the info they need to know specifically what the complaint was about, they can edit their post (found in their blog's dashboard status message, as well as by searching for posts in "draft" status) to remove the offending content and republish the post.

We realize this birthday present isn't for everyone—we'd hope most of you never receive a complaint. But music bloggers are a large segment of our users—and we know that for those who've received one or more DMCA complaints in the past, this may have been a frustrating experience. Please take care to remove the offending content once notified of the complaint—once you do, you can republish the original post so your audience will continue to have access to the other content contained in the post.

This was a cross-team collaboration between our legal, policy and engineering groups, and on behalf of everyone who helped make this change possible: happy birthday!

Rick Klau, Blogger Product Manager
Alice Wu, Google Legal Department
Steven Chen, Google Policy Team
Saurav Shah, Blogger Engineering Team

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Partly cloudy, chance of labels

2009-08-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer, Blogger (Krakow, Poland)

In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about your wish list for features in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget.

Label Cloud

Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a "cloud" instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly:

Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels:

Selected Labels

If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose "Selected labels." You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget:

We hope you like it!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Sending Blogger some Birthday Cheer

2009-08-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

by Brian Shih, Google Reader Team

If you use Google Reader to keep track of all the interesting Blogger blogs you're following, you might have run across something you really wanted to share on your blog. With Reader's new Send To feature, we've made it easier than ever to do this. Just head over to Reader's settings page and enable Blogger from the list of services:

Now, when you want to send a post to Blogger, simply click the "Send to" button and choose Blogger. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, "shift-t" will do the same. We'll send you over to Blogger with everything you need to write about the post. And that's it! We hope this makes it easier for you to blog about things you read in Reader - if you have feedback, please head over to our help group, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Blogger Joins the Hubbub

2009-08-17T23:11:00.000-07:00

When you publish a public blog post, you want to share it with the world—immediately! Blogger helps by feeding your posts to subscribers all over the web. Unfortunately, while we really want things to be as speedy as possible, sometimes it can take a while for the bits to travel through the intertubes.

We're happy to announce that Blogger has rolled out support for the PubSubHubbub protocol, which turns feeds into real-time streams. What does this mean to you? As feed readers adopt PubSubHubbub, your posts will surface immediately for their users. For example, Google Reader has started rolling out support for PubSubHubbub; when it's complete, your Blogger posts will surface in Google Reader as soon as you publish them. FriendFeed, Livedoor Reader (a feed reader popular in Japan), and FavIt already support PubSubHubbub—which means that their readers are already benefiting from this new feature.

Best of all, your blog is already broadcasting updates—you don't need to do anything to enable it.

Some more details: All blog post feeds now contain a "hub" element, and will ping Google's hub on every post update. If you're a developer writing code to monitor feeds and want to get updates efficiently in near real-time, you just need to detect the hub link and subscribe to the hub server. Then, sit back and let the hub push updates to you. To learn more about PubSubHubbub and start adding code to your project, see the PubSubHubbub site.

Thanks to Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin who worked on a 20% project with the Blogger team to add this support over the past few weeks. We encourage any developer who wants to get a near real-time flow of updates from Blogger to use PubSubHubbub for their application—it's simple, efficient, and lightning fast. If you have questions, you can find answers in our developer support forum, or you can reach us on Twitter: @blogger.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Blogger is turning 10

2009-08-17T15:37:00.001-07:00

A few months ago we mentioned that Blogger was turning 10 years old later this year. That day is almost upon us — just six days away in fact — and we've been hard at work trying to think about what we could give you to celebrate.

Wait, what? What we could give you? That's right. This is our birthday — but we're celebrating your contributions over the years. Over the past decade, millions of people around the world have made Blogger what it is today: a vibrant community of real people telling their stories. When we asked you to tell us your Blogger story, you responded: you connected with far away family, shared your art, grew up, demonstrated your expertise in an emerging area of research, overcome childhood adversity, met authors and poets you admire, coped with an illness, became a parent, learned a new culture, struggled with your parents' divorce, placed digital messages in virtual bottles, helped people fix their cell phones, wrote a novel. You even made the inaugural blogging team at school, and while there you're working on your PhD on consumer trends towards blogs. There are millions of such stories — and they grow by the day.

As we turn ten, we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features on Blogger. Some presents are because you asked for them this spring. Other presents are because they meant a lot to us. And some are because our friends (both inside and outside of Google) wanted to chip in and give you something. In short, it's a lot like a real birthday: you won't necessarily want or need every present that you get, but keep in mind: it's the thought that counts!

We're excited to share this milestone with you. Stay tuned, the next several weeks will be a lot of fun!

Tweet Your Blog

2009-08-03T01:42:00.000-07:00

Tweeting your new blog posts is a great way to engage your readers, and something that many on the team have taken advantage of for our own blogs. An easy way to do this is through Twitterfeed, which automatically updates Twitter with each new blog post. Here's how to set it up:

Head on over to the Twitterfeed site, click Sign In with OpenID and type in your Blogger blog's URL. Once you've registered you'll then be taken to the New Feed page where you can start linking blog feeds to your Twitter account.

First click the Connect your feed to Twitter Account button, which will prompt you to enter your Twitter login credentials to authorize Twitterfeed's access. You will get a nice little confirmation once you've successfully linked up your Twitter Account.

Next just enter a name for your feed, as well as your blog's Feed URL into the form. If you want to customize your feed's settings you can modify frequency, add prefixes, and even create keyword filters. Otherwise you're all set—click the Create Feed button and your Twitterfeed is enabled.

You can always come back later to the Twitterfeed site and modify your feed settings, as well as look at click-through metrics for existing feeds.

Contribute Gadgets to Blogger

2009-07-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

(cross posted from Blogger In Draft)

Calling all Developers! We've just launched several extensions to the Gadget API that will enable developers to build more relevant and engaging gadgets for Blogger.

As you may already know, every Blogger blog is a gadget container. What's more, every blog is an OpenSocial gadget container powered by Friend Connect. This means that as a gadget developer you can leverage social APIs to build engaging tools for bloggers and their audience.

In addition to leveraging social data, gadgets can now access a blog's post and comment feed via new JSON APIs. For example, with this data you could easily build a map gadget that maps the geo-location of posts, or a "Most Commented On" gadget that ranks posts by the number of comments they've received.

Need to be inspired? Recently we asked our users what gadgets they most wanted to see in Blogger. Hundreds responded and here's their wish list.

When you build a gadget for Blogger, it becomes available to millions of active bloggers. Just submit your gadget to us, and within minutes it will surface in the Blogger gadget directory where users can easily browse, configure, and add your gadget to their blog's sidebar.

So now that you know Blogger is a great distribution platform for your gadget, what are you waiting for? Get started building Gadgets for Blogger now.

Important Note: The APIs and documentation are new, so there may be bugs. Let us know by posting to the Blogger Developer Group if you run into problems developing your gadget.

Partner Profile: Lijit

2009-07-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

Periodically, we profile a Blogger partner that can add functionality to your blog. This week we'd like to spotlight Lijit, a company building "search powered web applications for publishers" (that's you!). Lijit has made adding its "wijit" as easy as could be—just fill in your blog's URL and complete the sign-up wizard, you'll be good to go.

What does Lijit give you? For starters, Lijit provides a nice search tool for your site that will not only search your blog, but search the blogs of your friends, and all of the related sites (Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc.) that you and your friends use regularly.

Where Lijit shines is in the stats they gather for you: what are people searching for when they come to your blog? Once they arrive, what do they then look for? Where are they coming from? How has search traffic changed over time?

Best of all, Lijit lets you expose this info via a customizable "wijit" so that your visitors can see where other visitors are coming from and what they are looking for. To see this in action, take a look at Dark UFO's Lost Spoilers site, a Blogger blog focused on unraveling the mysteries surrounding the TV show Lost. The Lost Spoilers wijit shows not only the most recent searches that have brought visitors to the Lost Spoilers site:

It also shows a map of their visitors:

And finally it shows a list of the most recent visitors, their locations, and if they used a search to visit the site, the search term they used:

Interested? Give Lijit a try - just visit their site and you'll have it on your blog in just a few minutes!