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Here’s a quick summary of recent fixes and changes we’ve made to Blogger:
Apologies again for the unexpected appearance of star ratings. Look for this feature soon (opt-in only!) on Blogger in draft. Google Docs has just updated their embedded presentation feature to support multiple sizes, so now presentations can look even better in blog posts. To add a presentation to your blog, create it in Google Docs and copy the “Mini Presentation Module” HTML into a blog post. (See: Embedding Presentations in a Web Site)
For an example, take a look at this small-sized presentation: You can include YouTube videos, images, and text captions into slides to condense and display a “deck” of graphical content in a concise format in your posts. Google Docs is a free, web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. Try it now.  Scheduled post publishing, which we talked about testing on Blogger in draft last month, is now live for everyone. If you set a post’s date into the future, Blogger will wait to publish until that time comes.Have you ever wanted to announce something on a certain date but knew you wouldn’t be at a computer to make a post? Or you wanted to keep posting regularly but knew you’d be on vacation for a few weeks? Scheduled post publishing is here to help you out. Scheduling a post is easy to do: on the post editor page, click the “Post Options” toggle to show the “Post date and time” fields. Then, type a post date and time that’s in the future. When you click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, it will be automatically published to your blog.  “Scheduled” posts appear in your Edit Posts list alongside your drafts and published posts. To un-schedule a post, simply save it as a draft any time before it gets published.  One quick note: If you want to give a post a date in the future but have it appear on your blog now, you’ll need to add in an extra step. First, publish your post with the current date and time. This will make it appear on your blog. Then, edit the post to change the date into the future and publish it again.We don’t re-schedule posts that are already published, so the post will stay on your blog but sort to the very top. The same is true of future dated posts you’ve already made, so there’s no need to worry about your existing posts disappearing, or having your blog assaulted by unplanned entries in, say, 2027. P.S.: Thanks to everyone who tested this out on Blogger in draft and posted comments! We appreciate your time and effort. We haven’t made one of these posts for a while, so here’s a quick summary of some of the changes and fixes we’ve made today and in the past few weeks.
Today’s Fixes
 We’re bidding farewell today to Eric Case. Eric joined Google five years ago so that he could do something — anything — for Blogger. Since then, he’s answered support tickets, launched blogs, designed features, hung out with MC Hammer, eaten very slowly without drinking, and, for the past year, been our product manager, with all that that entails.We’ll miss you, Eric! You made Blogger better. Good luck with your next endeavors, and we’ll be reading your blog. — Pete, and the rest of the Blogger team Have you tried out Blogger in draft, Blogger’s experimental features site, recently? Blogger in draft is a version of Blogger with features we’re trying out before we “publish” them to everybody on the main site. (See our original announcement: “Blogger... in draft.”)
If you’re feeling adventurous, all you need to do to try it out is log in to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com. If you see the blueprint logo then you’re in the right place.Our two latest features, which you can try out now on draft.blogger.com, are:
We have other page elements on draft, too:
Update: This was an April Fools Day post. :)
Today we’d like to offer you a sneak peek at an exciting new product we’ve been working on: Google Weblogs. Since Google bought Pyra Labs in 2002, we’ve been dreaming, planning, and implementing the next revolution in personal publishing: Google Weblogs.  Google Weblogs, or “GWeblogs,” or “Gblogs,” which will launch later this year in a public beta, is the next revolution in personal publishing. Here’s what you can expect:
We’ve put together a quick video tour to take you through the highlights of Google Weblogs. Check it out! For all you visual learners who want to add features to your blog, but don't have the patience to browse our help articles, we've created the new Blogger Help YouTube Channel. There you can find videos that show you step by step how to use Blogger features.
 Going to be in Austin for this year’s South by Southwest festival? That makes several of us!Blogger is once again rocking it out at Club de Ville [map] with delicious snacks, an open bar, Blogger Play, and our SXSW staple: climate-inappropriate schwag. The party starts at 9:30PM this Sunday and goes until 2AM on Monday. You’ll need an invitation to get in the door. Members of the Blogger team will be at the Interactive conference, so just stop anyone you see wearing a Blogger logo and ask. If it’s one of us, you’ll get an invitation. If it’s someone else, you’ll still make a new Blogger-loving friend. Want more drinking on Google’s dime? Come to these parties: Google Party Light Bar [map] Saturday, 6PM–8PM (This would be a pretty sure place to find invitations to the Blogger party as well.) OpenSocial OpenBar McCormick & Schmick’s (back room) [map] Monday, 6PM–8PM See you there! With GrandCentral, a free service from Google, you can receive phone calls and post voicemails right on your blog. Though GrandCentral is currently in a private beta test, bloggers can skip the wait and get a free account immediately. Sign up now
 WebCall ButtonWhen you add GrandCentral’s WebCall button to your blog, your readers can easily call your phone or leave voicemails without ever seeing your telephone number. You can screen calls, either accepting them or sending them to voicemail, and you can even block unwanted callers altogether. Learn how to add a WebCall button to your blog, and try it out for yourself below: Voicemail Inbox  Your voicemail is all kept in a visual online inbox that is easy to manage. Store as many as you like for as long as you like, or post them to your blog so anyone can hear them. Here’s what it looks like to put a voicemail on your blog: Sign Up Now Ready to get started? Follow these links:
 I'm saddened to have to do this yet again, but today we're saying our collective goodbyes to Graham Waldon, one of the longest-serving members of the Blogger team at Google. I was fortunate enough to have interviewed Graham before he joined us back in 2003, and after a few minutes of chatting I immediately knew he was our guy.Over the years Graham’s provided amazingly patient and exemplary service to Blogger’s users, and set an impossibly high bar with his work — from constantly improving Blogger’s Help site, to personally answering countless help emails, to digging up fantastic Blogs of Note, to training new members of the Support team. He’s even moonlighted a bit, helping the Reader team with their support efforts! Best of luck, Graham — it looks like you’ll be keeping plenty busy during the coming months, but be sure to swing by for lunch every now and then. ;) - Eric and the rest of the Blogger team  This is a quick post to announce that, in addition to Blogger’s recent improvements and fixes, we are now available in Filipino.There is already a very strong blogging community in the Philippines, and we’re very happy to support that and be a part of it. Want a taste? Start with our friend Aileen and keep clicking!  Today’s release brings a number of updates to Blogger:
Update, 8:30PM: Added new transliteration languages to features list Update, 12:30PM: Fixed embarrassing typo in this post’s title. (Thx, Kamilia!) We are excited to announce that Blogger is now available in three more languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian!
 Blogger in Hebrew, Arabic, and PersianBesides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, we have right-to-left templates and have added new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor. The effort was worth it, however, and we’re tremendously happy to be a part of the growing Arabic-, Hebrew-, and Persian-language blogging communities.  Changing your language preferences and settingsTo see the Blogger interface in one of these languages, just use the menu on your Dashboard. You can also choose your language on Blogger’s homepage and via the “Language” link in the footer of most pages. From then on, all new blogs you create will default to using your new language choice. If you need to change the language of an existing blog, just go to Settings > Formatting and select a new language there. Your blog language affects date formatting and other blog text, and, with today’s release of Blogger, your blog’s comments form as well. Right-to-left templates For Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew blogs, we will also rearrange your template to read more logically from right to left. So, a blog that once looked like this:  will now look like this:  Please note that your template won’t change if you’ve customized it with Edit HTML; we wouldn’t dare muck with your data! Also, if you’re still using a Classic template you will have to upgrade to Layouts in order to take advantage of bidirectional language templates. Learn how. Bidirectional text editing We’ve also added right-to-left and left-to-right buttons to Blogger’s post editor. They’ll appear if your Dashboard language or your blog’s language setting is for a right-to-left language.  Clicking on these buttons will set the paragraph you are currently editing to either right-to-left or left-to-right mode. This way you can write truly bidirectional posts.Happy rtl-blogging! 2007 has been Blogger's most amazing year yet! As you'll remember, we began it just after we had taken the new version of Blogger out of beta. Here's a quick run-down of many of the fun things we did since then:
Two fixes just went live, before we sign off for a brief holiday break:
Thanks for your patience! After just two short weeks of testing on Blogger in draft, OpenID commenting is now available for all Blogger blogs. This means that your friends and readers can leave authenticated comments on your blog using their blog URLs from OpenID-enabled services such as WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals, or with their AOL/AIM accounts.
 We've chosen a few popular OpenID providers to highlight on the comments form, but OpenID is, well, "open"! You can use any OpenID service to post a comment by choosing "Any OpenID" and filling in your OpenID URL.  You'll see the OpenID icon ( ) next to the names of commenters who posted with their OpenID. This icon assures you that the person who posted the comment is the same person blogging at the URL their name links to. Say goodbye to comment spoofing!Turning on OpenID commenting on your blog If you've set your "Who Can Comment?" setting to "Anyone," OpenID will be enabled on your comments pages right now! To change your comments settings, go to your blog's Settings | Comments tab in Blogger, and select "Registered Users" or "Anyone" in the Who Can Comment setting:  Getting an OpenID URL for your site Blogger provides helpful shortcuts to WordPress.com, LiveJournal, TypeKey, and AOL, but you can use any URL that you control as your OpenID URL by using delegation. For example, say you have a LiveJournal account with the username "brad." This gives you an OpenID URL at http://www.livejournal.com/users/brad/. You could comment with this URL, but you'd rather have your comments link to your homepage at http://bradfitz.com/. By copying two lines of HTML into the <head> tag of http://bradfitz.com/, you can turn it into an OpenID URL. Then, you can use http://bradfitz.com/ to sign your comments, while logging in to LiveJournal when you do so. Delegation gives you complete control over what URL you use to represent yourself online, and complete control over what service you want to use to login with. Sam Ruby wrote a great article about OpenID delegation that we recommend if you're interested. LiveJournal, AOL, WordPress.com, and TypeKey aren't the only OpenID providers out there. If you need an OpenID account, you can also get one from myOpenID, Verisign, or any other service that implements OpenID. The "Other" URL field Right now, the only way to add a URL to your name when commenting is to sign your comment with OpenID. We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from launching OpenID support on Blogger in draft. Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. We regret this appearance, since we're strong supporters of OpenID and open web standards in general. If you haven't set up OpenID, you can still link to your blog — or any webpage, for that matter — by using the standard <a> tag inside the comment form.  As you videobloggers already know, you can upload your videos directly to Blogger. But for the rest of the video watchers out there, did you know you can just as easily post YouTube videos to your blog?All you need to do is set up your YouTube account to post videos to your blog using the "Share" button. You'll enter your Blogger information once, and from then on it's one-click sharing from any YouTube video page!  See our help article for full instructions.   Take a look at our latest tool for your blog: the Slideshow page element. This feature lets you add a slick little slideshow of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Photobucket, or any site that supports Media RSS.The photos will show up in your blog’s sidebar, gently fading into one another. Your readers will be able to go forward and backward, pause, and click through to the photo’s web page. You can also make a slideshow of public photos based on a tag or label. Like all page elements, Slideshow requires that your blog is using Layouts templates. Still need to switch? Read our help article on the topic. In case you missed it: Want to see everyone’s photos? Watch Blogger Play. Sasha Cagen’s To-Do List blog (which you may recognize as a blog of note) has just been released as a book! Both blog and book are collections of, well, to-do lists, mailed or emailed in by people. Think PostSecret meets Getting Things Done.
Watch the trailer, read the blog, buy the book, and make sure that you have an awesome screen name. The results are in from the Blogger Challenge on DonorsChoose.org. Over 100 blogs and their readers helped to raise $420,000 for classroom projects benefitting more than 75,000 students in low-income communities. For more details and a list of some of the top blogs involved, check out the Official Google Blog.
AdSense recently introduced a feature called video units, that lets you include relevant YouTube video on your blog, and make money from ads on it. Here’s what they have to say about it:
"We're excited about the launch of video units -- a new way to enrich your blog with quality, relevant video content in an embedded, customizable player. Simply embed a snippet of code and have relevant YouTube partner content streamed to your blog. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your blog's content. Companion and text overlay ads are relevant and non-intrusive. To further blend the YouTube player into your blog, you can also customize the color scheme and layout as well as choose from three different player sizes."AdSense Help has some more information about video units. Once you’ve created the code for a video unit, you can easily add it to your blog’s template using an HTML/JavaScript page element. Last night we pushed a small-but-crazy-useful new feature for all Blogger blogs: subscribing to comments via email. This makes it a lot easier to stay in the conversational loop after you’ve commented on a post somewhere. For example, you could follow along with these discussions from some recent Blogs of Note:
 In order to receive follow-ups via email, you’ll need to post your comment using your Google Account. We only send comments to your verified Google Account so that someone else can’t use this feature to send you email you didn’t sign up for.In honor of Blog Action Day, we wanted to highlight some of the many Blogger-powered blogs that are focused on the environment, climate change, and sustainability. Want to see more Blog Action Day participants from around the web? Find them on Blog Search.
 Have you been enjoying Blogger Play? We introduced it here last month and so far it’s been mesmerizing viewers across the Internet with the latest photos as they’re uploaded to Blogger blogs.Today we’re letting you take Blogger Play with you to your iGoogle homepage with the Blogger Play Google Gadget:  We also took the opportunity to add keyboard control to the big version of Blogger Play: spacebar plays and pauses, and the left and right arrow keys move backwards and forwards. |
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