Blog List : New Feature for Blogspot Users and Few Updates

Bloggers often feature a list of their favorite blogs, called a “blogroll,” in the sidebar of their own blog. The latest page element, Blog List, helps you do just that, but it is mixed with Google Reader to make it even more powerful and useful.

At its most basic, Blog List displays a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon. If you link to a blog with an Atom or RSS feed, however, the Blog List can show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post.

You can set the number of blogs to show in the list and whether they should be sorted by update time or alphabetically by blog title.

You add blogs to your Blog List by entering blog or feed URLs directly, or by importing subscriptions from Google Reader. When you add by URL, Blogger will attempt to detect an Atom or RSS feed for it in order to show post and update information. If none is found, the blog will still be added to the Blog List, just as a simple link.

Remember: Like all features mentioned on this blog, you must log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ to add a Blog List.

Additional Notes

• The Blog List writes all links out in HTML so that, unlike JavaScript-based blogrolls, you pass PageRank goodness on to the blogs you link to.
• The icon next to a feed is taken from the favicon.ico file in the blog’s home directory. Currently it does not support the “shortcut icon” link tag.
• Adding and removing blogs may not invalidate our cached version of your blog. If you’re having trouble seeing your changes, republish a post or make a small settings change to your blog.
• Some blogs don’t link to their Atom and RSS feeds in a way that blogspot can detect. In these cases, add the feed URL to the Blog List for best results.
• Only the blog admin who added the Blog List may edit and configure it. Why is that? You’ll find out later...;)

Also there are couple of updates to Blogger:

• Clearer identity options on the comment form, which now highlights some of the more popular OpenID providers more obviously.
• Transliteration is now available in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu as well as Hindi.
• Posts with more than 200 comments have them split across multiple pages.
• Layouts blogs now have a “Layouts” tab instead of “Template.”

There are few fixes to address bugs and other problems, including:

• Better Persian translations and other BiDi layout fixes
• A fix to the long-standing incorrect label counts bug
• Safari 3 support for the Layouts template editor pages
• Faster loading times for the post editor
• Improved international support in the post editor’s date and time fields
• Compatibility fixes for Picasa’s BlogThis! button

There are two new issues:

•   Comment pagination is not yet available for Classic templates
• The “Shrink to Fit” option in the Header and Picture page elements only affects new photo uploads