Blogger Buzz

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!

Blogger is Turning 10

2009-06-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

Google's about to have its second tenth birthday. In late August, Blogger will officially turn 10 years old. As our birthday draws near, we thought it would be interesting to share some fun facts about Blogger:

Every minute of every day, 270,000 words are written on Blogger
Millions of people worldwide use Blogger to publish to their blog each week
Almost two thirds of Blogger's traffic comes from outside North America (What's the #2 country after the U.S.? Brazil, followed by Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K.)
The most popular sport for our bloggers? Soccer (that's football to the rest of the world), more than four times larger than the #2 sport, baseball

While we're really excited about this milestone, we want the focus to be on you and the remarkable stories that you and millions of people around the world document on Blogger. After all, blogs are one of the true building blocks of the web, constantly updated not only with news and personal stories, but any kind of information you can imagine. Just this week, there's an Iranian student documenting the minute-by-minute proceedings in Iran, while a British woman is uploading nightly blog posts from her satellite phone while rowing solo from Hawaii to Australia, while an American college student is running from Amsterdam to Athens with nothing but the pack on his back. There are literally millions more.

What's your story? Did your blog help you find a job? Learn a language? Interact with your fans? Master a new skill? Battle an illness? Turn a hobby into a career? We read as many blog posts as we can, and what we do read is often brilliant. But we want to know more — we want to hear from you about what Blogger has meant to you over the past decade.

Do what you do best: tell your story. Write a post, and then let us know about it by filling out this form. Keep an eye on Blogger Buzz, where we'll be sharing some of our favorites over the coming weeks.

To the millions who have depended on Blogger to help you tell your story, thank you. To those of you who have yet to tell your story, creating a blog couldn't be easier: just visit blogger.com to get started. We can't wait to see what the next ten years bring — and stay tuned for details about the tenth birthday itself.

Zemanta helps you "blog smarter"

2009-06-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

Image by chucks via Flickr

We're always looking for tools to make blogging easier, and a number of us on the Blogger team have become big fans of Zemanta. Zemanta is a browser plug-in for Firefox and IE, and is available as a bookmarklet for Chrome and Safari. (More details here, you can download your version of Zemanta here.)

Here's how it works: while you write your blog post in Blogger, Zemanta opens up a sidebar next to the Blogger post editor. After you've written a few sentences, Zemanta analyzes the words in your post and suggests images and video that are relevant to your post; with one click, it inserts them into your post. (The Zemanta screenshot from Flickr in this post was inserted with just that one click.)

In addition, Zemanta looks for words/phrases it's familiar with, and makes it easy to link those words to URLs it knows about. The phrases appear immediately below the post editor in Blogger, and by clicking on them you automatically create the links Zemanta recommends. No more highlighting text, clicking "Link", pasting the URL - just click the words you want linked, and Zemanta handles the creation of the link - to webpages, maps, videos or pictures.

Blogger Labels are easier to use with Zemanta, too: Zemanta automatically suggests labels for your based on the text of your post, and creates the labels for you if you like. Finally, "Latest Update" gives you a list of blog posts from other blogs writing about similar topics. It's a great way to discover sites talking about similar topics, and if you'd like to point your readers to those articles for further reading, clicking on them in the sidebar inserts them as "Related reading" links at the bottom of your post (see below).

If you have a few minutes, the following video review by Blogger user Plug in SEO does a good job covering how Zemanta helps save you time while enhancing your blog posts. The blog post accompanying the reivew is also worth a read.

We'll keep our eyes open for other tools that make your blog better. Stay tuned!

Spruce Up Your Blog

2009-06-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Many of you have asked about Blogger templates. You've posted in the help forums, you've tweeted, one of our engineers actually got stopped in a coffee shop to talk about Blogger's classic templates. And by "classic" we mean "old". We found that many of you weren't aware of a wealth of third party sites offering quality Blogger templates, so we wanted to share some recommendations from your fellow bloggers about where they go for improved templates that work with Blogger.

Earlier this week, I asked you for your recommendations, and a number of you responded. In no particular order, here's what you suggested:

BTemplates. A free directory of user-submitted templates, classified by type and/or features.
The Cutest Blog on the Block. Run by Becky and Ashley of 2 Moms Talk, this site offers free, premade layouts, as well as customizable backgrounds.
Blogger Styles. Gallery of submitted templates, ranked by visitors and includes detailed configuration instructions.
FalconHive. Conversions of WordPress templates upon request, along with archive of past conversions.
All Blogspot Templates. Templates in 1-, 2- and 3-column options. Also includes AdSense-ready templates.
Zona Cerebral. Spanish site with dozens of templates to choose from, including several converted WordPress themes.
Quite Random. A number of free templates, and several Blogger-specific tutorials regarding setup and layout editing.
ChicaBlogger. In Spanish, templates designed primarily for women.
Deluxe Templates. Hundreds of templates, including many converted WordPress themes. Also has a nice "tips & tricks" section for customizing Blogger.
Pyzam. Thousands of templates, browsable by category and sortable by recency or popularity.
Our Blog Templates. 160+ free templates, all well-labeled for easy browsing to find the one you want.
eBlogTemplates. Combination of free and premium templates, and a wealth of tips for tweaking your Blogger blog.

Note: for the most part, sites above provide templates for Blogger's "Layouts". If you still see a "Templates" tab for your blog, you need to upgrade your blog to take advantage of these new features. This help article has some more information about using Layouts.

Finally, cheth shared a recent post he wrote where he finds his favorite templates (many taken from the sites above). It's a good overview, and gives you a good visual indication of just how varied Blogger templates can get.

Now would be a good time to remind you that before you make any changes to your template, you should download the current template and put it in a safe place. (Click "Layout", then "Edit HTML" and then "Download full template".) And just in case it's not clear from this post: every link above points to a third party site. Blogger cannot provide support for independently created templates. If you choose to use a template built by someone else, make sure to figure out how easy it is to reach them if problems arise.

We'll have more to say about Blogger templates later this summer; in the meantime, thanks to everyone who shared a recommendation. We hope the list above gives you some variety when picking the next design for your blog!

Search Box gadget available to all

2009-06-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

Today we’re bringing the Search Box gadget out of Blogger in Draft and making it available to everyone. With this gadget, your readers will be able to search not just your posts, but web pages linked from your blog, your blog list, and link lists.

To add the gadget, go to your blog's Layout page, then click “Add a Gadget” and click on “Search Box.” Configuration is easy: just select which elements you want your readers to be able to search.

Since its launch on Blogger in Draft we’ve made several enhancements to the look and feel of the gadget. It now provides simpler defaults, picks up your blog’s style and colors, integrates more tightly with your blog, and allows you to configure search across specific blog lists (in addition to link lists) The gadget uses the AJAX Search APIs to provide a tightly-coupled inline experience, and creates a Custom Search Engine for your blog that automatically updates when you update your blog, blog lists, or link lists.

Please let us know what other features you'd like to see in this search gadget.

Thanks for the feedback so far!

2009-05-05T16:18:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago we asked for your feedback about what you'd like to see on Blogger, and you've responded overwhelmingly! Since we opened the Product Ideas forum, we've received over 60,000 votes from 2500 users on 1500 different suggestions. We're very interested in the ideas we've seen so far, and hope that you keep them coming until the form closes on Friday, May 14th.

In the meantime though, we've noticed a few things on the Feature Request list that already have solutions, and we'd like to pass that information along to you:

Importing blogs from Wordpress

While we don't offer this feature directly within the Blogger UI, a handy little service called Wordpress2Blogger (which is hosted on App Engine) will help you convert your Wordpress blog into a Blogger blog. Then from your dashboard, click "Import" to import the converted file.

Feeds for labels

This can be done easily using the following URL structure:

http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABELNAME
Example: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/mobile

Feeds for Comments

This feed is also available now, with the following URL:

http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
Example: http://adsense.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

ShareThis widget for Blogger

The ShareThis widget can be added easily from their website, which supports Blogger blogs.

Multi-selects on posts to add labels in bulk

The Edit Posts list already support multi-selecting, so feel free to bulk-label to your heart's desire :-)

"Democratic" Blog of Note voting process

That's what the Blog of Note section of the Product Ideas page is for! We'll be posting many more of your suggested Blogs of Note, so please do keep an eye out.

Again, we really do appreciate all the great feedback and suggestions we've seen so far. We hope that you will continue to add more to the Product Ideas page over the next week, and make sure to get all of your votes in before the forum closes Friday, May 14th.

Update 5/15: The forum is now closed. Thanks for all the feedback!

FTP vs. Custom Domains

2009-05-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

Bloggers who rely on our FTP service to publish their blog to their own domain had a rough week last week. In fact, it's been a bumpy month or two. Let's start with the most important comment on this state of affairs: this sucks, and we're sorry.

(Note: this is a lengthy post, and goes into a fair amount of technical detail. If you don't use FTP to upload your blog, you can skip this post. --Rick Klau, Blogger Product Manager)

If you use FTP today, I'd like to start a conversation about whether this is the right approach for your blog. I've been talking with bloggers over the last couple weeks on this subject, and have found most users, when presented with the option of hosting their blog using Blogger's Custom Domain option instead of FTP, find Custom Domains to be a far superior option. That's not to say there aren't compelling reasons to stick with FTP, so I'm not interested at this point in trying to convince everyone to switch over to Custom Domains. But I do think it is preferable for most of you still using FTP, and hopefully this post will help lay out why.

Advantages of Custom Domains Over FTP

First off, what is a Custom Domain? If you own a domain, we can host your blog at your domain instead of hosting at yourblog.blogspot.com. Unlike FTP, where you transfer the blog's files to a webserver hosted elsewhere, Google actually hosts the blog on our servers. So why would you want to start using a Custom Domain over FTP? When Blogger released Custom Domains a couple years ago, we pointed out a couple obvious advantages:

1) Simple setup.
2) Faster publishing. You no longer wait for files to transfer to your remote host; as soon as you click publish, the post is available and all archive pages are updated.
3) Drag and drop template editing. Blogger's newer templates offer you a lot more in terms of customization, and make designing your page a much simpler process.
4) Access control. You can restrict access to your blog when we host it; there's no way to do this natively within Blogger (though your webhost may offer a way to do this separately).

In light of the recent experiences with FTP, here's two more:

5) Fewer moving parts. As I've dug in over the last few weeks on issues relating to FTP, as often as not the problems were not Blogger-related but were a byproduct of a webhost implementing stricter security on FTP logins (only whitelisting certain IP addresses, for instance, or throttling access for certain users). These are notoriously hard to isolate, particularly when they involve coordinating support with a third party. No one - including us! - enjoys the terrible back and forth of "it's the webhost's issue" "no, it's Blogger's issue" "no, we're pretty sure it's the webhost's issue" when all you want is to be able to post to your blog.
6) Free, scalable hosting. Google knows a thing or two about hosting content around the world, and by relying on Blogger for hosting you're getting the advantage of a robust hosting environment - for free!

Twitter Feedback: Why do you prefer FTP?

Enough generalizations. On Saturday, I asked users on Twitter to tell me why they preferred FTP over Custom Domains. I've listed the first few responses below, along with my thoughts:

@creuzerm: "I can easily back up my site via my backup scripts over FTP." (@cjewel and @Vin07 made similar points.)

Blogger users have a one-click backup option from the Blogger dashboard (Click Settings | Basic, then click "Export blog"). Unlike file backups from a remote webhost, Blogger's export (details here) does a full export of all posts, comments, the current layout, and your Blogger settings. At any time, you could recreate the entire blog with a single upload, and restoring the blog on a Custom Domain would take seconds (unlike FTP, which could take hours for larger blogs to transfer all of the necessary files). If you ever wanted to migrate off of Blogger, our conversion utilities will help you convert from Blogger's export file to most other popular blog formats. (Come to think of it, if you haven't backed up your blog lately, why don't you do that right now?)

@lizcastro: "FTP lets you get rid of the NavBar and better control of your branding."

There is no difference between control/branding between Custom Domains and FTP. In fact, you get more control over the look and feel of your template, with a more sophisticated, point-and-click interface to adding interactive gadgets - all of which are draggable in the template editor to get the exact placement and layout you want. If you choose to remove the navbar, there are several sites that walk you through the few steps necessary to remove it. We'd prefer you didn't - it helps users find your site, it makes it easier for users to search your blog, and we have several enhancements planned for the navbar this summer. But if you insist on removing it, a search for "remove Blogger navbar" will point you in the right direction. (Obviously, this is not supported and we can't provide support for any modifications you make to your templates.)

@eccentriclee: "I feel better having access to all files directly." @lizcastro: "FTP allows you more control over uploading things to your own server (or seems to) and uploading images with Blogger is cumbersome."

As detailed below, I have what I think is the best of both worlds: Blogger manages the hosting of my site (at a subdomain, tins.rklau.com), and I retain access to my webhost for file uploading (at www.rklau.com). Regarding image uploading, when you switch away from FTP, you get our integration with PicasaWeb, where you can host images. This tends to be a much more powerful way of managing uploaded images (all uploaded images are stored in a Picasa album for future reference).

@nomadness: "FTP lets me keep /blog inside long-established site hierarchy with other content at root."

This is a valid concern if the custom domain you choose is the same as the domain you currently use for FTP (i.e., you FTP to www.yourdomain.com/blog and want to use www.yourdomain.com for your Custom Domain). In my case, I chose to leave www.rklau.com alone and instead have Blogger manage a subdomain as my Custom Domain. That's not the whole answer, however - there's still the matter of getting people from www.yourdomain.com/blog to blog.yourdomain.com. See "Redirecting..." below.

@Vin07: "Afraid of posts being lost on switch..."

I'd suggest a backup to eliminate any risk. But rest assured, no posts are lost in the switch.

There were two responses that are completely valid reasons for sticking with FTP:

@haitai: "In China, the ghs.google.com always blocked by #GFW, FTP web host isn't." @johnroach: "Blogger sometimes gets blocked by Turkey and so does some internet sites."

Yep, if a country blocks access to Google domains, and you or your audience is primarily in that country, then you'll want to host on a domain that's not blocked.

@creuzerm: "I am planning on doing a PHP blog template."

If you absolutely need to execute PHP within your template's pages, you'll have to host on a domain where PHP is installed and supported. Of course, there are a ton of gadgets that can add functionality to your site, so you may be able to do what you need without adding custom code. (On the "Layout" tab for a Blogspot or Custom Domain-enabled blog, click "Add a Gadget".)

One note: if you do stick with FTP, we'd strongly recommend checking with your webhost to see if they support SFTP - it's much more secure than FTP.

Redirecting from your FTP blog to your Custom Domain blog

OK. Let's assume that you've read this far, and have decided that you want to give a custom domain a try. If your blog has been around a while, you'll be concerned about links to your soon-to-be old URL.

I started my blog on Blogger in 2001, using Blogger's FTP service to publish to www.rklau.com/tins/. At the time, that was the only way to use Blogger to manage my blog on my own domain. I later switched to Movable Type (retaining the same URL), and then migrated to WordPress in 2005. Back in November, in anticipation of joining the Blogger team, I moved back to Blogger. After chatting with the Blogger team, I knew I wanted to take advantage of many of the new features on Blogger - but because I had a ton of images and files on www.rklau.com that I'd uploaded over the years, I didn't want to map www.rklau.com to Blogger.

My answer? I moved the blog from www.rklau.com/tins/ to tins.rklau.com. I created a CNAME for tins.rklau.com that maps to Google, and now Blogger hosts the blog. All of the old posts with pointers to files and images at www.rklau.com continue to work. I documented how I use WordPress to redirect requests from the old posts to the new ones here. If you're moving from FTP to Custom Domains, then there's one last step - redirection - to ensure that requests to the former URLs find your new URL.

How you implement the redirection depends on what kind of server you're hosting on. If you're on an Apache webserver (most common) then you'll want to use something called htaccess. If you're on an IIS server and you don't manage the server yourself, you will need to talk to the webhost to get the redirect in place.

To create an htaccess file, first create a text file which includes the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://blog.yourdomain.com/$1

This assumes your blog is published to /blog, and that your new Custom Domain is blog.yourdomain.com - change those values as appropriate. Now upload this file to your webserver, and name it ".htaccess" (no quotes, but the period preceeding "htaccess" is important) in the root directory. All this does is take incoming requests to files in the /blog directory, and redirect them to blog.yourdomain.com, while keeping the rest of the URL intact. Since Blogger will keep the same permalinks in the migration, this will preserve all inbound link traffic.

Questions? Comments?

I'm sure I haven't addressed all of the issues users have with staying on FTP instead of Custom Domains. And I will freely admit I have an agenda with this post: the less time Blogger engineers spend supporting a brittle feature (FTP), the more time we can spend building out new features. If you have questions not addressed with this post, we've set up a help group focused on this topic. Head on over there to ask a question or view current discussions: Blogger team members and users familiar with the pros and cons of both FTP and Custom Domains will be in there, and we'll answer questions as they come up.

To all of you who continue to rely on Blogger as your blogging platform: thank you.

Going somewhere interesting? Share it with the world!

2009-05-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

by Chris Lambert, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

If you ask people why they blog, a lot of the answers you receive will probably center around the idea of starting conversations. I love talking with friends and family about the countries I've visited and the cities I've explored, and personal blogs are a great way to share these stories. However, I have never met someone who felt they had enough time to post all of the updates that they wanted, especially when they are off traveling. Well, wouldn't it be great if anytime you were traveling somewhere new, taking off on a road trip, or just on your way to an exciting place, there was a way for you to automatically publish that information to your blog? We thought so too, and that's why we decided to release the Google public location badge, powered by Google Latitude.

Google Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile that lets you easily share your current location with a select group of your friends and family and, with your permission, it will continuously update in the background. Latitude is also available as an iGoogle gadget. While Latitude has been really popular, a lot of people -- many of them bloggers -- have asked for a way to share their location information on the Web, for all the world to see. Now with the Google public location badge, you can share your Latitude location with everyone on your blog. Check out Danny Sullivan's blog to see how it looks.

To give it a try, visit this website. You will need to be a Latitude user to enable the badge. We made it easy to customize the type of badge that you want on your blog and let you choose between showing either your best available location or just the city that you're currently in. To add the code snippet to your blog, you can either click the "Add to Blogger" button, or copy and paste the code into an HTML/Javascript gadget that you can add from your Layout tab on Blogger.com.

Please be aware that by enabling this badge your location will be available for everyone to see; you cannot decide who gets to see it. If you want to have more privacy, you can select 'city-level location' or choose to 'disable' the badge altogether. If you have any suggestions or run into a snag, let us know in our Help Forum.

We want to hear from you!

2009-04-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

Over the years we've learned that some of the best insight into Blogger comes from you guys, the millions of users who use it every day. So we thought it'd be a great idea to open up the floor for feedback, and provide an easy way to let us know what you'd like to see.

With the help of Product Ideas, we've created a forum which allows you to submit and vote on new feature suggestions, gadget recommendations, and even Blogs of Note! The more feedback we get the better, so please take a moment to check it out, and then tell your friends.

We'll be keeping a close eye on all of the responses, so please stay tuned! We'll keep the forum open until Friday, May 14th.

The fine print: All support issues should still be directed to the help group. Off-topic submissions may be removed by the team. And Blogs of Note is for Blogger blogs only ;-)

Post On The Go

2009-04-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

Our newest graduate from the Blogger in Draft testing ground improves the experience of blogging on the go. In this release, we've updated the Dashboard to simplify setting up email and mobile posting for your blogs.

Enabling mobile posting is a great way to open up your blog to all sorts of instantaneous, real-world updates from wherever you find yourself. Stumble across something awesome that you want to share with the world right away? Snap a perfect picture on your phone that would be great addition to your photo blog? Our new mobile service supports SMS, MMS, and email posting, so there are plenty of options for 'mobilizing' your blog.

To set up SMS or MMS posting, simply click the phone icon next to a specific blog from your dashboard.

We'll then show you a claim code, which you can send to BLOGGR (256447) via SMS (or go@blogger.com via MMS) to associate the blog to your device. (At the moment, SMS posting is only available in the US.)

To set up email posting, simply click the envelope icon next to a specific blog from your dashboard. You'll then be prompted to create a secret email address for your blog. Emails sent to this address will be posted to your blog, and photo attachments will be inserted between the post's title and body.

iPhone tip: SMS does not support photos, and the iPhone does not support MMS. To post pictures from your iPhone to your blog, set up email posting and email the photos to your blog's secret email address. (For help on setting up email on your iPhone, see Apple's "Email account setup" help article.)

You can even create a blog directly from your mobile device, by following the instructions outlined here. You will be able to claim it later once you are back at your computer.

So go ahead and take your blog on the go, and if you run across something cool, please tell us about it!

Monetize!

2009-04-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that about a week ago a new tab showed up in Blogger for your blog. The tab is called Monetize, and in case it isn't clear what that means: it's now easier than ever to make money with your blog! (There's also a "Monetize" link from your Dashboard as well.)

The current Monetize tab allows you to apply for an AdSense account (or link your Blogger blog to an existing AdSense account). You can then choose where to place ads on your blog, and once ads start appearing on your blog, review your earnings. We use the AdSense API to pull your live earnings data from your AdSense account, so now it's easy to check how your revenues are doing without leaving the Blogger interface.

Please note that new applications may take a few days to process, and not every site will be approved (for more on the eligibility criteria for an AdSense account, please see here). Details about the monetize tab and the information presented there is available in Blogger's Help section.

Blogger & Google Reader Party @ SXSW

2009-03-06T19:44:00.000-08:00

Going to be in Austin, Texas for South By Southwest? Blogger is! And we're throwing a party with our friends from Google Reader. Come, drink, and talk blogs.

Party is at Six Lounge (117 W 4th St @ Colorado) on Sunday, March 15th from 10pm - 1am. Bring your SXSW Interactive Badge, or find a Blogger or Google Reader team member at the conference and ask for an invitation. You'll recognize us by our schwag.

See you there!

Plinky: An answer to "blogger's block"

2009-03-03T13:20:00.000-08:00

The fact that there are tens of thousands of results for "blogger's block" suggests that more than a few of you have struggled to think of what to say on your blog at one time or another. If that sounds like you, you might want to take a look at Plinky. Plinky is the brainchild of one of the original Blogger team-members, Jason Shellen, and we've enjoyed seeing what people have come up with in the first few weeks of answering Plinky prompts.

What's a Plinky prompt? Glad you asked! Here's their explanation:

Every day we provide a prompt (i.e. a question or challenge) and you answer. We make it simple to add rich media and share your answers on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Not only does Plinky provide help with what to post to your Blogger blog, but it also helps your answers look good in the process. Depending on the prompt, answers contain rich media elements like maps, photos, lists and cover art for books, movies and albums. It's easy to tell Plinky that you use Blogger and all your answers posted through Plinky can go right to your blog.

What are you waiting for? Go answer a prompt! (And say hi to Shellen while you're there.)

Friend Connect: Grow Your Blog's Community

2009-02-27T11:50:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, we introduced a feature called Following, which lets readers publicly subscribe to your blog. Since then it's been incredibly successful: nearly three million communities in 39 languages have followers, and every second of every day, a reader follows a blog.

But your readers come from across the web, from Yahoo, AOL, WordPress, Typepad... not just Blogger. That's why we're excited to announce that we've integrated Blogger Following with Google Friend Connect.

Friend Connect encourages readers to use one account (whether it's a Google account, a Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account) to follow any site - a Blogger blog, a WordPress blog, or any other site that has incorporated Friend Connect. Each site that a follower joins will show up on their Friend Connect profile. Now your blog will benefit from increased exposure as your readers interact with other sites around the web - and their friends see your blog listed as one they've chosen to follow. (Check out how to follow a blog)

Blogs that are using the Following feature have automatically been migrated to Friend Connect, so you don't need to do a thing. And be sure to stay tuned - over the next several months, there are a number of additional features coming to Blogger as a result of today's Friend Connect integration.

One note for readers who previously followed one or more sites with Blogger Following and joined one or more sites with Friend Connect: you can decide whether or not to show the sites you've joined via Blogger Following and Google Friend Connect in your Blogger profile. By default, we have turned the "Show blogs I follow in my Blogger profile" option off. If you change your mind, here are instructions for making this list of sites public on your Blogger profile.

Update Feb. 26, 2009: For sites whose follower counts have decreased, here is an explanation that goes into more detail about the decision to make certain followers private.

Facebook Your Blog

2009-02-12T14:20:00.001-08:00

Over the years we've heard lots of great ideas for promoting your blog, and have been compiling them here as a handy reference. From simply adding links to enabling cool newer features such as Following, we're always happy to update the page when we stumble across something new.

Our latest addition comes from our friends at TypePad, who have put together a great video on How to add your blog feed to your Facebook profile. After trying this ourselves, we've found that integrating your blog feed into your Facebook profile can be a really effective way to keep your friends updated on the latest from your blog.

So if you've been looking for slick new ways to expand your blog's audience, check out the video and give it a shot!

Blogger in 140 characters or less

2009-01-09T14:42:00.000-08:00

With several Twitter fans on the Blogger team (not to mention a number of Blogger alumni work at Twitter), it seemed only natural that we set up shop on Twitter ourselves. We will be posting status updates, major feature announcements, and pointers to cool uses of Blogger will all show up in our Twitter account. We will do our best to keep an eye on replies to @blogger as well, but our Help Center and Blogger Discussion Group remain the best places for help from fellow users as well as the Blogger support team.

Your blog, your data

2008-12-10T18:00:00.000-08:00

Today’s release features a brand new graduate from the Blogger in Draft testing ground: Import and Export for Blogger blogs.

The import/export feature opens up a whole new range of portability for your blogs, as well as allows for a few new options in the blog creation process. To get you started, we've rounded up a handful of ideas that can be done with importing and exporting:

Merge two or more blogs into one. Have a few scattered blogs and want to get a fresh start? Now you can combine comments and posts from multiple blogs into a brand new blog.
Move individual posts from blog to blog. Cross-publish your posts on multiple blogs, or transfer large batches of posts from one blog to another with a single click.
Back up your blog to your own storage. It's never a bad idea to create backup copies of your own content, and now you can easily export an archival copy of your blog to your hard drive with a simple tool.
Move your blog somewhere else. Our standard Atom XML export format will open up new blogging channels between providers, and let you take your content with you should you decide to move somewhere else. And of course, if you decide to come back to Blogger, importing your export file will get you back up and running in seconds.

You can access Import and Export from the Blog Tools section on the Settings | Basic tab.

We have also added new importing options to the blog creation process:

For some more detailed info on all of the things you can do with Import and Export, please check out our accompanying help article.

A couple caveats

Currently we only support importing Blogger blogs. We don't yet support importing from WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal or any other blogging platforms.
Before importing a blog for the first time, we recommend that you create a new, throwaway blog to import into so you get a sense for how the process works. Once you’re comfortable, import into your public blog.
If you have enabled a content warning for your blog, then you will have to remove it before your blog can be exported.

iLike: Add a soundtrack to your blog

2008-12-05T17:03:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we stumble across gadgets that are just too cool to keep to ourselves. And such is the case with the slick iLike gadget, which should be a real treat for all of you Blogger audiophiles out there.

iLike brings music to your blog by letting you embed and share playlists that you make yourself. Using their simple interface, you can organize and arrange your tunes, then seamlessly integrate them into your blog's sidebar.

To get started, head on over to the playlist editor and build up your list of tunes from the iLike database. When you are finished, simply click the orange 'Done!' button at the bottom of the page, and you will be taken to a preview of what your playlist will look like on Blogger.

If everything looks good, click the orange 'Add to Blogger' button to go to Blogger's Import Page Element Page (if not already signed in you will be prompted to do so.) Then choose the blog which you want to have the playlist, and click 'Add Widget.'

The iLike gadget will now show up in your blog's page elements editor for you to arrange as you wish. Pretty cool, eh?

Keep in mind though that playlist editor feature of iLike is still technically in beta, so the usual caveats apply. However, if you are feeling extra entrepreneurial you could help out the iLike dev team by answering their quick survey.

Reactions: easily engage your readers

2008-11-06T13:13:00.000-08:00

One of our goals at Blogger is to make it easy for authors to get feedback on their content; we believe that authors are driven in part by the reactions and criticisms offered by their readers, and that these interactions enhance the quality of blog content. In support of this effort, we're launching Reactions, simple annotations chosen by authors and given by readers.

With Reactions, readers can easily respond with one click, increasing feedback on posts.

Photo by Kevin Steele

To enable Reactions, log in to your dashboard, go to Layout > Page Elements and click the Edit link in the Blog Posts element to open the blog post configuration tool. Then, check the box next to Reactions, edit your reactions as a comma-separated list, and click Save.

Reactions works with Layouts templates, though if your template is heavily customized, you may have to reset your widget templates for Reactions to appear. If you have a Classic template you will need to switch to Layouts to use Reactions.

Of course, Reactions isn't the only way to gather great feedback from readers; we also recently launched the Embedded Comment Form. With both Reactions and better commenting, we aim to make it easier for you to get the response and adoration you deserve.

Try Reactions now! We hope your reaction is <3.

Updated, 2:30 PM: Corrected to say that Reactions is a Layouts-only feature.

Blogger.com - more like a big truck, less like a series of tubes

2008-11-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Here at Blogger we’re always working to make the site and your blogs faster and more reliable. We want you to think of us as a big truck: able to handle anything you can dump on us.

Tuesday’s election was a good chance to see just how big a truck Blogger actually is, and we’re happy to report that Blogger-hosted blogs, for the most part, held up under the record-setting traffic.

That being said, there were definitely some hiccups (potholes?) along the way. Our favorite political and polling analysis blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, received an order of magnitude more visitors than the next most visited blog. They also received more than 50 times as many comments as the next most commented-on blog. Unfortunately, this traffic caused some publishing delays for Nate and Sean as well as some intermittent slowness on their site.

After we got word of the trouble, we were able to shift some resources around to keep things running fairly smoothly for the rest of the night. Now that traffic has calmed down, our engineers are hard at work tuning and improving Blogger based on the experience.

We’d like to thank bloggers, commenters, and readers for participating in one of the biggest blogging events ever. Your voices validate what we do, and every day we look forward to making Blogger faster and better for you.

Welcome AOL Journals Users!

2008-10-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

As some of you might know, AOL has recently decided to sunset its AOL Journals service. To help Journals users continue to share their thoughts online, Blogger has built a simple migration tool to move an AOL Journal to Blogger. We'd like to welcome our new Blogger users to the community and are looking forward to hearing what they have to say!

We've been hard at work here at Blogger and have added a number of new features in the past few months. If you're a Journals user who wants to explore our features, or even if you're already a Blogger user but you want to see what's new, check out our features page. Over in our user group you can share your blog with others or find new blogs to follow. If you're still hungry for more blogs, the Blogger team regularly posts interesting and noteworthy Blogger-powered blogs at Blogs of Note.

Below are some more resources for new Journals users. Welcome again!

Take a Tour

Help Resources

User Group

Commenting made easier

2008-10-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

Today we’re bringing the embedded comment form out of Blogger in draft and making it easily available to everyone. This feature puts the comment form at the bottom of each post page, below the comments, instead of on the separate, Blogger-styled page.

The embedded comment form is more convenient for your readers because they can use it to post a comment immediately, without clicking over to a different page. It also looks better, since it matches your blog’s style and colors.

If you’re logged in to Blogger with your Google Account, you can also subscribe to comments via email by clicking the “Subscribe” link. Unlike with the full page comment form, you don’t need to post a comment to subscribe.

To enable the embedded comment form for your blog, go to the Settings > Comments page and look for the Comment Form Placement setting. Change it to Embedded below post, save your settings, and go check out a post to see the new form in action.

The embedded comment form works on both Classic and Layouts templates, though if you’re using a heavily-customized Layouts template you may need to reset your widget templates before the embedded comment form will appear.

We think that the embedded comment form is a big improvement, so we’ve made it the default setting for all new blogs.

Happy commenting!

Update, 10/23: We regret that this feature is being enabled for some existing blogs that didn’t specifically enable it. We are working to undo that, but in the meantime if you see this on your blog and don’t want it, go to Settings > Commenting and change Comment Form Placement to either “Full page” or “Pop-up window.”

Publish to your Blogger blog from iGoogle

2008-10-22T17:11:00.000-07:00

Today, we’re releasing our Blogger Post Gadget for iGoogle. Now you can edit and publish posts directly from your custom iGoogle homepage, making it even easier to share your thoughts with the world.

To get started, just click that “+ Google” button to have the Blogger Post Gadget added to your iGoogle page.

You can use HTML in the text box, but if you want more rich text editing — for example, to upload a photo — just click “Save Draft” and you’ll get a link to edit the post in the full Blogger post editor.

Blogger Following for All

2008-09-11T10:04:00.000-07:00

A few posts ago we let you know about Blogger Following. The feature lets readers publicly subscribe to your blog (so you know who's reading) and adds a Reading List to your Blogger Dashboard so readers can stay updated with the blogs they follow.

Now it's available to all users in English. We'll keep you updated about when we launch it in Blogger's other languages.

To learn more about Following, read the Blogger Buzz Post or the Google Blog Post.

New stuff from the Picasa folks

2008-09-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

For more than a year, you have been able to view all the photos you've uploaded to your blog in Picasa Web Albums. It's been good -- having a dedicated photo management interface comes in handy when you want to do things like embed Blogger photos elsewhere on the web, order prints, create slideshows, and so on.

Today, Picasa Web Albums has undergone a significant redesign, and is launching a slew of new features to help you better organize and enjoy your photos, including all of your Blogger Photos. Along with a much-refined interface, there's a powerful new 'name tags' feature that helps organize your photo collection based on who's in each picture. For fun, check out the new Explore page, or take a look at the Recent Photos stream (unabashedly inspired by Blogger Play).

Oh, and one more thing: If you use Picasa (the client software) to edit and organize all the photos on your PC, we're happy to report that Picasa's venerable 'BlogThis!' button still sits front-and-center in the next generation of Picasa software, which also launches today as Picasa 3 (beta). If you've never tried it before, now's a great time to start -- Picasa 3 includes plenty of new photo-editing goodies that can make your blog's pictures look better, like a powerful retouch tool, greatly revamped photo-collage and slideshow creators, simple video editing, desktop/web sync, and more. To learn more, swing by the Google Photos blog.