Blogger in Draft

Geo Turned Off (Temporarily)

2009-11-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

We’ve temporarily disabled the geotagging feature in the Blogger in draft post editor due to it not working and showing that annoying JavaScript alert.

The feature will come back once we fix it up. Sorry about the inconvenience.

You Might As Well Jump!

2009-09-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

by Sean McCullough, Software Engineer, Blogger

(cross post from Blogger Buzz)

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.

Happy Birthday from Blogger!

4 New Gadgets from Blogger Buster

2009-07-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

Amanda from Blogger Buster has developed 4 new gadgets for your blog's sidebar.

	Display thumbnails of your most recent Picasa photos. Add it now
	Share your recent Twitter updates Add it now
	Show your most recent posts, with optional summaries Add it now
	Show your most recent comments, with optional summaries Add it now

To add these gadgets go to your blog's Layout tab, click Add a Gadget, and then click Featured. There you'll find Amanda's gadgets along with other gadgets we are currently featuring.

You can stay updated when featured third-party gadgets are added by subscribing to the Blogger Featured Gadget blog.

Interested in building useful gadgets for bloggers? Get started now by reading the Blogger Developer Documentation.

Note: Currently some third-party gadgets will not display correctly in the Chrome browser. We are working on a fix for this.

Contribute Gadgets to Blogger

2009-06-18T14:08:00.000-07:00

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. That means 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 thirty 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.

Better Mobile Posting

2009-03-12T18:59:00.000-07:00

Blogger already has several ways to post via a mobile device, but who knew? With our last release to Blogger In Draft, we've made it a lot easier to set up mobile posting to your blog via SMS, MMS, and email.

If you already have a blog on Blogger, you can configure mobile posting by going to your Blogger Dashboard on draft.blogger.com.

Enable SMS or MMS for your mobile device by clicking on the gray phone icon next to your blog name.

We'll show you a claim code that you can send to Blogger via SMS or MMS to register your device and link it to your blog.

Once you've registered your device, you're done! Messages you send to BLOGGR (256447) will be posted to your blog. Note: SMS posting on Blogger currently does not work with T-mobile devices.

To enable Email posting to your blog, return to your Blogger dashboard and click on the gray envelope icon. You'll see a dialog that prompts you to define a secret email address.

Emails you send to this email address will be posted to your blog. Include a photo in your post by sending it as an attachment. Blogger will insert the photo between the title and the body of your post.

To edit your Mobile settings, you can click on the phone or envelope icons on your Blogger Dashboard, or go to the Settings > Email & Mobile tab.

If you are away from your computer, but want to create a blog on-the-go you can also create a blog directly from your mobile device. Follow these instructions to create a blog from your phone and claim it later.

Let us know how the service goes by leaving a comment. If you experience problems please tell us what type of device you're using, your cellular carrier, whether you used SMS, MMS, or Email posting, and your blog URL. Also please note that SMS posting is not yet available for T-mobile devices. Thanks!

Autosave and Automatic Date and Time

2009-02-13T10:54:00.000-08:00

We’ve recently added two new features to the post editor on Blogger in draft: autosave and automatic date and time.

Autosave is a feature we’ve had for a while on the old post editor, and it does what you’d expect: automatically save your draft posts when you pause in your typing. We’ve brought the same convenience and safety to the new post editor.

With automatic date and time, your posts will now be timestamped with the date and time that they’re published, not the date and time when you first opened the post editor (as has been the case). You can of course still explicitly set the date and time by opening Post Options and switching to Scheduled at instead. Once a post is published, it will keep its date by default, even if you go back even if you go back to edit the post and re-publish.

New feature: Geotagging

2008-12-10T13:14:00.000-08:00

We’ve just added geotagging to the new post editor on Blogger in draft. With geotagging, you can add a location to your each of your blog posts. Just as time stamps help readers find posts from a certain date or time, geotags give your readers a way to browse posts near a specific location.

Adding a geotag to your post is easy. Log into draft.blogger.com, open the post editor, and click the add location link below the main text field.

Use the location editor to search, drag, click and zoom on a map to choose and save a location. We’ll try to label the location you choose using our reverse geocoder, which looks up a name for a point on the map. You can also edit the location name by clicking the blue location name text below the search field.

When you publish your post, the geotag is displayed below your blog post as a link, which will open up Google Maps.

We also include each post’s location in your blog’s RSS and Atom feeds using GeoRSS, a standard for geotagging. This means that feed readers, map applications and search engines can associate your posts with their locations.

We’re still working on other ways to show geotag information on your blog. Brian, the Google engineer who created this feature in his 20% time, has written a gadget that will display your posts on a map. To add it to your blog, click “Add Your Own” on the “Add a Gadget” page and paste in this URL: http://blogmap-gadget.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/blogmap.xml

Geotagging has a few known issues. We'll be addressing them shortly, but here are some suggested workarounds for the near-term:

The location editor is hidden behind the text field in the Edit HTML tab. Please switch to the Compose tab to view and edit locations.
A geotag cannot be removed from a post once it has been saved. If you need to remove a geotag, please copy your post content into a new post and delete the geotagged post.
Update 2:33pm: If you have a customized template and you don't see the "Location:" byline, you may need to reset your blog's widget template. Do this by going to the Layout > Edit HTML tab in your dashboard, and then clicking Revert widget templates to default below the main text field.
Update 2:33 pm: Some users are having issues with the blog post map gadget. Brian is investigating.

What types of posts are you adding a location to? What other functionality would you like to see in this feature? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!

Help us test Import and Export

2008-11-24T19:09:00.000-08:00

This summer, we launched Import / Export on Blogger in Draft. The feature lets you export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one.

Over the last few months we've gotten a lot of feedback and made a number of improvements (we now support very large blogs!). We think it's just about ready for prime time.

Please help us out once more by trying Import / Export on Blogger In Draft.

How to use Import / Export (note: You'll need to export your blog before you import it)
Report issues with the feature

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.

New Feature: Contact Picker

2008-11-14T09:40:00.000-08:00

We’re making it easy to use your existing Gmail contacts in Blogger. We’ve added a “Choose from contacts” link below some of your blog’s settings fields, such as Comment > Comment Notification Email and Email > BlogSend Address. Click the link to bring up a window with your Gmail contacts list.

Currently we don’t have the picker built in to the Permissions settings, but we’re working on it.

Finding your contacts ok? Any problems? Let us know in the comments.

Feature Updates and Bug Fixes for September 23rd

2008-09-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

We’ve just released a few fixes to some of the features currently here on Blogger in draft.

Reactions gets some visual improvements, including fixes for display in IE 6 and overall spacing fixes. We’ve also tweaked the HTML and images to make it load a bit more quickly.

We’ve fixed an Import / Export bug that was truncating the export of comments. Also, importing scheduled posts will keep them scheduled instead of publishing them immediately.

We’re bringing the Embedded Comment Form closer to feature parity with the full page comment form by adding e-mail subscription for follow up comments. If you’re logged in, you can now also subscribe to comments without posting one of your own. We’ve also added improved color matching in the form for all browsers.

Features and Bug Fixes for August 14th

2008-08-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

Today’s release to Blogger in draft brings one new feature: Reactions, which are customizable one-click buttons below your posts. Read more on our announcement post, and try them out on this blog.

We’ve added better show/hide controls and brought back the post count and Blogs of Note to the new dashboard, and published it to the main Blogger site.

In case you missed it, we moved Google Gadgets and the gadget directory to the main Blogger site as well.

This release also has some fixes to other Blogger in draft features:

New Post Editor

Edit HTML mode now has a toolbar.
The Compose toolbar gets a fifth font size, and “Normal” should now more correctly match the font size on your blog.
Newly added images will correctly pick up the border styles from your blog’s template.

Import / Export

Basic settings are now saved and restored.
Templates (both Classic and Layouts) are saved and restored.
Exporting a blog will now cause the XML file to download in Safari.
Import blog messaging now distinguishes between published and draft posts.

New feature: Reactions

2008-08-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

With our new Reactions feature, you can get one-click feedback from your readers. Think of it as a mini-poll for each blog post, or a flexible version of star ratings because you customize what options are available. We hope this will help your blogs get feedback from people who read your posts but don’t have enough to say to for a full comment.

To enable Reactions, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts gadget and then check the “Reactions” checkbox. You can edit the Reactions buttons by clicking "Edit" or clicking the buttons themselves, as shown.

You can customize the location of the Reactions within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box. We’ve found that it looks best when it’s on its own line, but your mileage may vary.

You can customize the options and their label to match the theme and style of your blog.

Additional Notes

This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Reactions.
The buttons should blend seamlessly with most blog backgrounds. Button backgrounds are a mostly transparent grey which should, we hope, coordinate with everything. The text and button highlight colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
- Foreground: textcolor, textColor, mainTextColor
- Highlight: linkcolor, linkColor, mainLinkColor
If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the reactions. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Reactions code from a fresh template. Search for “reactions-buttons” to find the appropriate block of code.
A known issue: if you choose short words/phrases, it’s possible to enter enough options that the line of buttons will wrap (and not look very good). If this happens to you, you'll need to shorten your options or reduce their number.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!

New toolbar, AJAX saving, and other fixes for the post editor

2008-07-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

Today we’ve released a few enhancements to the new post editor, fixed some bugs, created a new one or two, and left a handful of things to fix later.

New Stuff

AJAX save. We’re still not saving posts automatically, but now the “Save Now” button will keep the post editor open, and Ctrl-S works as a shortcut for saving. (Internet Explorer users: use Ctrl-Shift-S to save.)

New toolbar. This toolbar looks better, loads more quickly, and has undo and redo buttons. By popular demand, the full justification button has returned. We’ve also added a strike through button and improved the color palettes.

Vertical resizing. You can now change the height of the post editor by dragging the resize handle in the lower right (near the labels field). The size is saved in a per-user, per-blog preference.

Fixed Bugs

<div>s in Edit HTML are now better-preserved in Compose mode. This should fix most post summary hacks. If your hack uses tags, please switch to using <div>s.

Lists created in Compose mode can now have new items added to them after switching to Edit HTML and back.

Line breaking is no longer lost when editing a post in the old editor that was first written in the new editor.

Nested block-level elements no longer create odd blank lines.

Non-breaking spaces now consistently appear as   in Edit HTML mode.

New Bugs (that we know about)

The publish and save buttons wrap oddly on Mac browsers.

Major Remaining Bugs (that we know about)

The Font Size menu has 4 sizes instead of 5, and “normal” looks small.

Paragraph tags are lost when switching from Edit HTML to Compose.

The Blockquote button still behaves oddly, especially in Internet Explorer.

The URL an image links to cannot be changed without using Edit HTML mode.

Images inserted with this editor do not pick up border styles from the blog template.

Inserting a new link with the link dialog loses your place in the post.

Find anything else? See: How to report HTML bugs with the new post editor

Things Left To Add

Toolbar in Edit HTML mode

Autosave

Spellcheck

Video upload

FTP image upload

Bi-directional text input and Indic transliteration

and a handful of smaller things too numerous to include here

How to report HTML bugs with the new post editor

2008-07-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

We’d like to thank everyone who has been trying out the new post editor on Blogger in Draft and putting it through its paces. As many of you have noticed, the new editor handles HTML somewhat differently from the old editor, and tricks and conventions you may be used to are not working or screwing up your post’s formatting.

We would like to fix as many inconsistencies and problems as we can before we unleash the new editor on all Blogger users, so we’d really appreciate reproducible bug reports when you see a problem.

The three key pieces of a helpful bug report are:

“I typed/clicked/did…”
“I expected to see…”
“What I really saw was…”

For example:

My post template is:


Full post


I opened up a new post in Firefox on XP and typed two paragraphs in Compose mode. When I switched back to Edit HTML, I expected to see:



First paragraph

Second paragraph



But what I saw was:


First paragraph


Second paragraph

Comments on this post are a fine place for these bug reports, or, if you post them on a blog, just link to them from the comments.

We realize that writing about HTML can be tricky in the post editor or the comments form. You can replace “<” with “<” or put a space right after the “<” to prevent the editor from treating it as HTML. Or, if you make the post with the new editor, you can turn on “Show HTML literally” in the Compose Settings section of the Post Options.

While we can’t commit to making the new editor work exactly like the old in every regard (if we did, that might break some of the new useful features, such as drag-and-drop image placement), we really want to keep the differences down to as few as possible. Your feedback and bug reports will make this possible.

Thanks in advance!

Updates and Bug Fixes for June 26th

2008-06-26T18:35:00.000-07:00

Today’s Blogger release is a big one for Blogger in Draft. Let’s lead off with the quick stuff:

Google Gadget integration continues to improve, with better editing of gadget preferences.

The new look for the Dashboard has seen a handful of tweaks, including a new button style that we’re trying out and, by popular demand, the “show all blogs” toggle is now sticky.

The subscribe page element has been published to WWW.

We’ve added a “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” to the Blogger in Draft dashboard, so now you don’t have to remember to type “draft.blogger.com” instead of “www.blogger.com.”

So you can easily keep up with the news, we’ve added this blog as a tab on the Blogger in Draft Dashboard.

But that’s not what you came here for. You wanted this:

Webmaster Tools Verification. Turn this on to automatically add and verify all your blogs on Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Star ratings. Add a 0–5 star rating control to the bottom of your posts so that your readers can rate them.

Import / export of blogs. Back up all of your posts and comments to one Atom XML file on your computer, and import your posts from one blog to another.

Embedded comment form. By incredibly popular demand, we’ve brought the comment form to your blog’s post pages, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.

New post editor. We’ve completely revised the post editor, bringing in drag-and-drop image placement and better HTML handling.

As always, these features are on Blogger in Draft because we’re not done with them and we’re looking for your feedback. Please read the posts for each of the features before trying them so that you know what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure you leave comments! These are big features for us, so we want to get them right before we turn them on for everyone.

New Feature: New Post Editor

2008-06-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

Today we’re releasing the first iteration of a completely new version of the Blogger post editor. This editor is more stable, compatible, predictable, and will help us bring more functionality to posts on Blogger over the coming months and years.

Out of the gate you’ll notice two areas where the new editor improves significantly over Blogger’s current editor: images and raw HTML.

One important quick note before we get into those, however: Autosave is currently disabled in the new post editor. We’ll turn it on in an upcoming release, but for now it’s off. You’ll want to periodically remember to save your drafts when using this editor.

On to the fun stuff!

Improved Image Handling

When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience. The thumbnails will be available until you close the post editor.

When you add an image from the dialog into your post it will be placed at the insertion point instead of at the top of the post.

If you don’t like where an image is in your post, you can drag it around to another spot. If you drag it towards the left side of the editor it will float to the left, likewise for the right, and if you leave it in the center it will be centered. You can drag the image between paragraphs and other block elements. Unlike in the current editor, dragging in the new editor preserves the link to the full-size version of the image.

You can easily resize or remove an image with the image size “bubble.” Click on the image (Firefox 3 users may need to double-click) to bring up the bubble, and resize the image instantly. You can resize any image, including ones added by URL, but if you resize an image that was uploaded through the post editor we resample the image on our servers to keep the download size small.

It might be easier to see this in action, so we made a short video to show off some dragging and resizing:

Improved Raw HTML

If you use Edit HTML, especially to add tables and other advanced HTML to your posts, you should find that the new editor has a number of enhancements to make the experience less frustrating, or, dare we say it, even pleasant.

By default, the current post editor replaces any newlines in your post with tags. This can cause problems when you want to use newlines to make table or list HTML clearer, since the inserted s will mangle the formatting significantly. The new post editor does not introduce s within tables, lists, scripts, styles, preformatted blocks, or objects.

Since they won’t destroy the formatting, the new post editor adds clarity newlines to the HTML that’s generated by Compose mode. For example, if you create a list in Compose mode and then look at it in Edit HTML, you’ll see that there are newlines before each of the <li> tags.

For posts made with the new editor, the blog-level “Convert line breaks” setting (from Settings > Formatting) is ignored. Instead, newline behavior is controlled by an Edit HTML setting under “Post Options,” which affects how newlines and tags are displayed in the Edit HTML editor. This means that, unlike “Convert line breaks,” you can change newline behavior when it would be useful for a given post without affecting the display of all the other posts on your blog.

We’ve also added a Compose mode setting to let you choose what happens when HTML tags are typed in to the Compose editor. The default, “Interpret typed HTML,” matches the current post editor’s behavior: typing “bold” into the editor would look like this in your post: bold. If you change the setting to “Show HTML literally” instead, you’ll get: bold.

The Edit HTML and Compose settings, along with the choice of whether to show Edit HTML or Compose by default, are saved per-user, per-blog and are updated when you save a post. The Edit HTML setting defaults to the value of the blog’s “Convert line breaks” the first time you open the new editor.

Other New Features

You’ll find other new functionality here and there in the new editor. Here are a few more highlights:

Easy link editing in Compose mode. Just click a link and you’ll have the option of changing its URL or removing the link.

Full Safari 3 support on both Windows and Macintosh. The old editor is pretty quirky on these browsers, but the new editor works as you’d expect.

New Preview dialog that shows your post in a width and font size approximating what you’d see on a blog.

Placeholder image for <object> tags (such as those from video embeds) so that you can see and drag them around Compose mode.

Currently Missing Features

Besides the aforementioned autosave, there are a handful of other features from the current post editor that are on our to-do list for the new editor. If you rely on any of these, you may not want to use the new editor for everything just yet.

Spellcheck

Video upload

Hindi transliteration

Bi-directional text controls

Toolbar for Edit HTML mode

FTP file upload

Enclosures

Be patient: these will all come to the new editor over the upcoming weeks. Look for announcements on this blog.

Known Issues

We’ll be adding to these in the comments, probably, but here are a few little problems you might run into right now:

The “Blockquote” button is unreliable in Internet Explorer 6.

Lists and other block elements may get an additional blank line above them, which can be removed after re-editing the post.

You cannot add more items to a list if you toggle from Compose to Edit HTML and back, or re-edit the post. As a workaround, add new <li> tags in Edit HTML mode.

Bold and italic keyboard shortcuts do not work in Safari, and the publish and save keyboard shortcuts are not implemented in any browser.

The site-specific modification that Opera added to enable the old rich text editor does not work with the new editor. We’re investigating adding official support for the new editor under Opera 9.5.

All images uploaded through the new editor will go to Picasa Web Albums, even for FTP blogs. Images will not get uploaded to your blog’s FTP server.

Image upload will not work for accounts that have not accepted the image upload Terms of Service. Upload an image through the old post editor to get the opportunity to view and accept the ToS.

Internet Explorer 5.5 is no longer supported.

We hope that the above issues and missing features will not prevent you from at least giving the new post editor a try.

This editor will, when it’s ready, replace the current post editors across all of Blogger. Therefore, we really appreciate your feedback and especially reports of bugs and other strange behavior that you find. We’d like to address them all now so that things will go smoothly when we turn the new editor on for everybody.

New Feature: Import and Export

2008-06-26T18:20:00.000-07:00

Today’s release brings another long-desired feature to Blogger: Import and Export of blogs. Now you can export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one.

To export your blog, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to the Settings > Basic page. You’ll see the Blog Tools links at the top of the page for importing and exporting. (We also moved blog deletion up here from the bottom of the page. Don’t worry about accidentally clicking it, though; your blog wouldn’t be deleted until you confirmed on the next page.)

Once you click “Export blog” and press the “Export” button on the next page, your browser will prompt you to save the XML file for your blog. Keep it somewhere safe as a backup, or import it into a different blog. You can import one blog into another from the Blog Tools links, or when creating a new blog. Look for the “Advanced Options” at the bottom of the page.

When you import a blog, all of the posts will get saved in an “imported” state. From there you can publish just a few, or all of them at once. Here are some ideas for what you can do with importing and exporting:

Merge two or more blogs into one. Take the exported posts and comments from one blog and import them into another one.
Move individual posts from blog to blog. After importing, select just a set of posts to publish and publish them with one click.
Back up your blog to your own storage. You can keep your words safe and under your control in case anything happens to your blog, or us, or if you want to remove them from the Internet.
Move your blog somewhere else. Our export format is standard Atom XML. We hope to see other blogging providers extend their Atom support to include import and export. And, if you decide to come back to Blogger, importing your export file will get you back up and running in seconds.

Caveats

The export format currently only covers blog posts and comments to those posts, not blog settings or templates. To back up a Classic template, copy and paste the template code from the editor. To back up a Layouts template, use the Backup / Restore template option to download a copy of your template.
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.
At the moment there is a 1MB size limit on the blog you can import. This is a bug that we are correcting the issue.

Have you imported or exported your blog? Let us know about how it went in the comments.

New Feature: Embedded Comment Form

2008-06-26T18:15:00.000-07:00

One of the most common complaints about Blogger’s comment form is that it’s on a separate page from the post, styled in a way that doesn’t match the blog. Our new embedded comment form addresses that by putting the comment form where your readers expect it: at the bottom of the post.

To turn on the embedded comment form, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to Settings > Comments for your blog. You’ll see that the “Show comments in a popup window?” setting has been replaced with the new “Comment Form Placement” setting. Just click “Embedded below post,” save your settings, and go check out a post to see your new comment form.

Additional Features

The comment form works with Google Accounts, OpenID authentication, name / URL, and anonymous identities. As with the current comment form, we’ve set up shortcuts for a handful of common OpenID providers.

Once you log in with a Google Account for one blog, you won’t have to log in to comment on other blogs during your browser session. Nevertheless, to protect your privacy, we use an <iframe> to keep your logged-in identity inaccessible to the blog itself.

If you have a “Comment Form Message” set up, we put it on the post page above the comment form.

If you require word verification for commenting on your blog, we’ll show the word verification form in a small dialog after you click “Post Comment.”

Update, 6/27: The embedded comment form works with Classic templates. The <$BlogItemCreate$> tag will add the right HTML to your page.

Caveats

If you’ve edited your template for the blog widget, you won’t automatically pick up the new code for the comment form. You’ll need to either reset the template by deleting the contents of the <b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'> element (backup your template first!) or copy the code from an unmodified blog. Update, 6/27: Amanda from Blogger Buster has written a howto post for updating a modified blog widget template.

The font color of the comment form is currently hard-coded to black. If your template has a dark background, this may make the “Comment As:” label hard to read.

The embedded comment form currently does not support subscribing to follow-up comments via email, nor does it have a preview button.

How’s it working for you? Anything else you’d like to see? Does the comment form look particularly good or bad in your template?

Let us know in the comments, now with convenient embedded comment form technology.

Webmaster Tools for Blogger

2008-06-26T18:05:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder why your blog shows up where it does in the Google search rankings? With our new Webmaster Tools integration that information is just a click or two away.

Webmaster Tools is a Google service that provides you with detailed information about your website’s visibility to Google’s search engine. You can see how often Google’s web crawlers visit your site, find out who links to your site, what searches are used to find your site, and even control how your page appears in the Google web results.

We’ve added a new link from the Blogger in Draft dashboard to take you directly to Webmaster Tools. If you follow it, we’ll add all your blogs to Webmaster Tools and verify them for you automatically. From there, you can poke around and learn about how Google search sees your blog.

You can learn more about Webmaster Tools at Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

As always, your comments and feedback are extremely important to us and we hope you’ll give this feature a test drive.

New Feature: Star Ratings

2008-06-26T18:00:00.000-07:00

With our new Star Ratings feature, your readers can easily rate your posts — or the things you post about — from one star to five stars with a single click, right from the post footer.

Think of Star Ratings as a mini-poll for each of your posts. If you blog about fashion, food, crafts, quotes, or art we think this will be particularly useful to you.

To enable Star Ratings, log it to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts page element and then check the “Show Star Ratings” checkbox.

You can customize the location of the stars within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box.

Additional Notes

This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Star Ratings.
The star ratings widget should blend seamlessly with most solid-colored blog backgrounds (one exception is Rounders, where the edges of the widget will be visible via a color change). The text and background colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
- Foreground: textcolor, textColor
- Backrgound: mainBgColor, bgcolor
If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the Star Ratings. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Star Ratings code from a fresh template.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!

New Feature: Posting Gadget for iGoogle

2008-06-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

Today we’re launching a draft version of the Blogger Posting Gadget for iGoogle. With this gadget, you can write, save, and publish posts to any of your Blogger blogs directly from iGoogle.

Interested? Try it now:

Make sure you’re signed in with the same Google account you use on Blogger in order to start posting.

Currently, the gadget supports the following:

Editing the HTML of title, body and labels

A drop-down menu to select from multiple blogs (if you have them)

The ability to publish a post immediately, or save it back to Blogger as a draft post

Tip: If you start writing a post in HTML and decide that you want image uploading or other rich text features, just click “Save Draft.” The gadget will save the post, then give you a link to directly edit the post in Blogger.

Some compatibility notes:

The Blogger posting gadget will only work in iGoogle, not in other gadget containers, because it requires authenticating with your google.com cookie. We hope to remove this restriction in the future.

Since this gadget uses the JavaScript Google Data API for Blogger, it does not work in Apple’s Safari browser. We hope to fix this in the future as well.

~~We’re also hearing reports that the gadget is not working correctly in Internet Explorer. We’re looking into this.~~ Now works in Internet Explorer; you may need to remove and re-add the gadget to pick up the fix.

While there’s still a bit we’d like to do with the gadget, we want to announce it first on Blogger in Draft to get your feedback. Some of the improvements we’re considering are:

Availability in all of Blogger’s supported languages

Auto-completion for labels

Autosaving of posts

Rich text editing

What’s on your list? Let us know in the comments.

Update, 3:15PM: Added compatibility note about Internet Explorer.

Update, 6/10: Fixed to work in Internet Explorer.

New Feature: New Dashboard

2008-06-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

Our old dashboard was getting a little cramped, so we reorganized things and gave everything a fresh, new look. You can see this now by logging in to Blogger in draft.

The new dashboard contains all of the same information that the old one did, but rearranged to emphasize the most important content and changes (and with a little more room for future goodness).

By default, only some of your blogs are shown in the dashboard, although there’s a link you can click to display all of them. The blogs we show by default include the two blogs you most recently published to, as well as any with unmoderated comments or ToS/spam warnings.

Please try this out and let us know what you think in the comments! Your feedback is an important part of our design process and we’d like to know what you think before we release this re-design out into the wild.

Remember: Not sure where some of your blogs went? Click the “Display all blogs” link at the bottom.

Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for June 6th

2008-06-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

Today we have a couple of new features (more on those later in the day) and some bug fixes. We’ve also published Blog List, so it’s now available to everyone on the main Blogger site.

Here are the highlights:

The Google Gadget page element configuration has been greatly improved. We’ve fixed a number of cosmetic and functionality issues in this area. Try it out with the new unified Gadget and Page Element directory.
Adding feed URLs to a Blog List directly now works reliably for all supported feed types.
Adding a blog with no detected feed to a Blog List now triggers a warning dialog and icon.

Everything working ok for you? Let us know in the comments.

Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for May 9th

2008-05-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

We’ve made a handful of fixes to improve Blog List:

A “See All” link when you’ve truncated the list
Icon loading is deferred for better page responsiveness
Post title now links to post’s permalink
Newly-added blogs are highlighted on the configuration page
More reliable adding and removing of blogs, and better feed and title detection

If you’ve customized the Blog List widget template at all via Edit HTML, you will need to reset the template to get some of these new features.

We’ve also made some visual and reliability fixes to the new Gadgets directory, particularly around adding custom gadgets.

Note: we’re looking into reports of bX-e441ek errors for some people who have added Blog List to their blogs. We hope to have a fix out for this presently.

Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for April 21st

2008-04-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

Last week’s release fixed several bugs with blog list and scheduled posts:

Scheduled Posts

Scheduled FTP publishes now work.
Posts published via scheduling will trigger BlogSend emails.
General reliability improvements.

Please try these out if you were having trouble with scheduled posts. We’re aiming to take this feature out of draft in the fairly near term, so we’d like to make sure that everything works.

Blog List

Improved Blog List update reliability.
Fixed bX codes on Blog*Spot when certain sites are added to a Blog List.
Removed bolding of blog titles.
Usability and cosmetic improvements to the Blog List configuration dialog.