Blogger.com Rocks With the Introduction Of Lots Of New Features

Blogger in Draft, a draft version of blogger.com, has released lots of new features yesterday that will surely rock your blog. Below is a list of all new features that they released.

1. Star Rating

With this 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, 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.

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.

2. Webmaster Tools for Blogger

Ever wonder why your blog shows up where it does in the Google search rankings? With this 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.

You will find a new link from the Blogger in Draft dashboard to take you directly to Webmaster Tools. If you follow it, blogger.com will automatically add all your blogs to Webmaster Tools and verify them for you. 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.

3. Embedded Comment Form

Many of us don’t like the existing comment form as it’s on a separate page from the post, styled in a way that doesn’t match the blog. Well, this 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, they’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, it uses an <iframe> to keep your logged-in identity inaccessible to the blog itself.
• If you have a “Comment Form Message” set up, it will be put on the post page above the comment form.
• If you require word verification for commenting on your blog, it will show the word verification form in a small dialog after you click “Post Comment.”
• 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. 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.

4. New Post Editor

This is a completely new version of the Blogger post editor. This editor is more stable, compatible, predictable, and will help to 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.

Note: Autosave is currently disabled in the new post editor. It will be turned 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.

More details about this feature is available here.

5. Import and Export

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.

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 with blogger.com, or if you want to remove them from the Internet.
• Move your blog somewhere else. This export format is standard Atom XML. So it’s good if 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, it is recommended 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.

Read more...

Publish Post to Any Of Your Blogger Blogs Directly From iGoogle

Good News for all bloggers blogging through blogger.com. Blogger.com announced the launch of 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. This restriction will be removed in the future.
• Since this gadget uses the JavaScript Google Data API for Blogger, it does not work in Apple’s Safari browser. This will be fixed in the future as well.

Read more...

Scheduled Posts : New Feature for Blogspot Users

Sometimes you may come across situations where you want to publish your blog post in future. You’d like to write a post now and have it automatically published at some time in the future. Blogger in draft introduced a new feature that will help you to do so.

Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.

Your 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.

Remember: Scheduled Posts only work when you’ve logged in to http://draft.blogger.com/.

Read more...

Blogger as OpenID provider, More Support

Team at Blogger.com has been working on making Blogger an OpenID provider. Latest release of Blogger in Draft is all about that. You can now use your blog’s URL as an OpenID URL on any website that accepts OpenID 1.1 authentication.To enable OpenID for your blogs, just edit your profile on draft.blogger.com and enable the checkbox which says Enable OpenID for Blogs and you are all set!

After checking this box, you can use the URL of any of the blogs you are an admin of as an OpenID identity. When you use it to log in to another site, you will be taken back to Blogger where you can confirm that Blogger can tell the site that you own the domain.

You can find more information about OpenID and how it works at OpenID.net.

We hope you’ll try out using your blog as your OpenID identity around the web. Let us know how it goes in the comments! If you’re looking for things to do, take a look at MyOpenID’s OpenID Site Directory for OpenID-enabled sites.

Since this feature is still in draft, there are a few caveats:

1. OpenID for blogs is currently not supported for that aren’t hosted on Blog*Spot or a custom domain, such as FTP blogs. However, the OpenID web site has a help page that explains how to workaround this limitation by delegating your FTP blog to a Blogger-hosted blog.

2. If you say “Yes, Always” to trust an OpenID site forever, you cannot now delete that trust. This feature will be added soon. :)

Read more...

A Whole New Direction for Blogger With the Addition of Three New Languages

Blogger is now available in three more languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian!

With the addition of these 3 languages, Blogger is now available in 40 languages. It's really difficult job to add these 3 languages, because Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew are written from right to left. As you can see from the above screenshot, team had to flip the whole interface around.

Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, we have now right-to-left templates and have new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor.

Changing your language preferences and settings

To 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 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. 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

Right-to-left and left-to-right buttons are added 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.

Read more...