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As many of you will be aware, I also design premium Blogger templates which are sold through ThemeForest.net : a relatively new site which offers premium quality site and CMS templates. To help promote and raise awareness for the site, Envato are offering a $10 credit to the first 2500 commenters - a total of $25,000! This $10 credit could buy you one of the premium Blogger themes available on the site, or any other of the quality site templates, Photoshop source files or CMS templates available. To qualify for your free $10 credit, simply visit this post over at PSDTuts (also part of the Envato network) and follow the steps. You will need to be a registered member of ThemeForest to qualify for your credit, though it costs nothing to join (ie: you don't need to credit your account in order to become a member). If you've been considering trying out a Premium Blogger theme or are just interested in what ThemeForest have to offer, why not spend a few moments to comment and...

The Blogger team have added a new "Geotagging" feature to Blogger in Draft which enables you to add a location to each of your blog posts. This will then display in your post-footer section (near your post labels, timestamp, etc), and will act as a link to a page on Google Maps where readers can learn more about the location. Here's an example of how this would appear, as taken in screenshots from the explanatory post on the Blogger in Draft blog : When you click on the linked location, this will open a new page from Google Maps which shows you the exact location which the author has attributed to the post, like this: RSS support for Geotags Your post locations will be included in your blog's RSS and Atom (XML) feeds using GeoRSS which is a web standard for Geotagging. This is important as it allows feed readers, map readers and search engines to associate your posts with particular locations. For example, if you tag your blog posts "New York", thes...

Wishing all readers a very Merry Christmas!

The Blogger team have (finally) decided to embrace Twitter as a means of publishing updates for Blogger users. By following the official Blogger feed on Twitter , you can now receive news of status updates, blogs of note, service interruptions and fabulous new features even sooner than before. If you already use Twitter, be sure to follow these official Blogger tweets .

A few months back, Blogger announced the ability to import and export Blogger hosted blogs. At the time, it was not possible to import blogs from any other service to Blogger, which left many of us a little disappointed though wondering when this service could be made available. Well it seems there is hope that Blogger can make such a service available through our Blogger dashboards soon enough! Today the the Google Blog Converters project : an open source project which aims to make available the ability to import/export feeds from many different blog platforms: This new Open Source project provides the ability to easily move blog posts and comments from service to service. This initial release provides Python libraries and runnable scripts that convert between the export formats of Blogger, LiveJournal , MovableType , and WordPress . In addition, the source code includes templates for hosting these conversions on Google App Engine . Future additions to the project will includ...

In 2008 we saw a surge in the quantity and sheer quality of free Blogger templates made available for us to download. Now that designers are turning their attention towards designing for this free blogging system, we can only expect this musim for increased quality to extend far into the new year. Over the past twelve months I've published several posts offering collections of free Blogger templates for you to download. However, there are certain templates which are simply outstanding: the cream of the crop, which have proved their worth as the best Blogger templates of 2008. Here is my personal selection of the 20 best Blogger templates from 2008 (in no particular order or preference!) with previews and links to their download sites. I hope you will enjoy browsing through these templates if you are searching for an ideal template for your blogging project or simply to be inspired by great design. The Daily Inspired by Woork Antonio Lupetti's fabulous design is exclusi...

If you're familiar with the "Dummies" series of books, you'll understand how helpful and insightful these textbooks can be in dealing with any subject. That being said, I'm happy to announce that Google Blogger for Dummies is due to hit bookshops on February 3rd. It's available to pre-order now from Amazon.com  (priced at $16.49) and will be available in Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookshops, and also directly from Wiley. The author, Susan Gunelius, has been kind enough to send me a 60 page preview of this book, complete with a full and detailed table of contents and two sample chapters for my preliminary review. Also, when the book is released early next month, Susan has graciously offered me a copy of the book so that I can review it in it's entirety and offer readers my insights. What Google Blogger for Dummies will cover Being a "Dummies" guide, Google Blogger for Dummies will cover both the basics of using Blogger (crea...

Adding Google Maps integration to your web projects can offer visitors a more interactive experience of your website and assist the understanding of where events or business takes place. In a recent project, I decided to utilize Blogger to create a website for a local business, and found that including Google Maps was of great benefit for visitors to understand where the business is located. However, of the many tutorials on the web which explain how to add Google Map functionality to our websites, I was unable to find clear instructions for how maps can be added to a Blogger powered blog. Luckily I discovered two simple and highly useful techniques for adding Google Maps to blog posts with no editing of the template required. In this post, I'll explain just how easy it is to add interactive Google Maps to your blog posts, which can offer your readers further insight into events, business or other local information which are relative to your site or blog posts. An Overv...

For around a week now, many Blogger users have experienced Bx-error codes when attempting to upload a new template to their blogs when previously these templates had worked just fine. I discovered the reason for this on the Blogger Help Group after reading this post from Gatsby, a Blogger Employee: Recently we changed the way our template editor accepts certain third party code, so that it is now less tolerant of certain templates. We did this because we had seen a lot of data corruption due to 'bad templates,' and we are trying to stave off some of these issues pre-emptively. Now we realize that this has caused some inconvenience to folks, so we are re-thinking our decision and will post an update on that shortly.  At the time of writing this post, I have not found any notification that this issue has been fixed, and many of my own custom templates do not work in their initial state (I'll explain the fix later in this article). Since there are so many bloggers compl...

When Google Friend Connect was introduced a few months ago, it seemed inevitable that eventually this service would be closely integrated with Blogger to enable more social interaction around our blogs and social communities. Today the Blogger Buzz blog announced that Friend Connect has been integrated with the Followers feature , enabling readers to log in and become a follower of your blog using their preferred login details (rather than using only their Google account). As explained in the introductory post: [...] 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. This integration promis...

Roy Tanck 's Flickr Widget requires Flash Player 9 or better. Get this widget at roytanck.com If you enjoyed using Blogumus - the animated flash-based widget to display your blog labels - then I'm sure you'll love Roy Tanck 's latest widget creation: an animated, cloud style Flickr widget ! You can see an example of this in action on the left which uses my Flickr Photostream. Roy's widget is very easy to customize and add to your blog. Simply visit the Flickr Widget page and use the form to add your Flickr photostream feed URL, then choose the dimensions and background color for your widget. Once you're done, press the "Generate code snippet" button to be presented with a preview of your widget and the code. You can then paste this code into an HTML/JavaScript widget in your sidebar, or even directly into a blog post (as I have done here). Roy Tanck created the original WP-Cumulus widget upon which my Blogumus widget is based. He has done a f...

After posting about Roy Tanck's animated Flickr widget, I realized that I'd never actually written up a tutorial for the simple Flickr Photostream widget which I use in many of my premium templates. This version of the Flickr Photostream is a static widget designed to display thumbnails of your most recent Flickr uploads, and can be added quickly to your Blogger layout using a one-click installer. It's an ideal solution of you prefer a simpler method to display your Flickr photos which does not slow down page-loading time. You can see an example of how this widget could appear below: www. flick r .com To add this widget to your Blogger blog, you will need to have your Flickr user or group ID which may look something like this: 8191003@N02 The simplest way you get your Flickr ID is to use idGettr (opens in a new window), where you paste the URL of your Flickr Photostream in the box so idGettr can discover your ID for you. Once you have your Flickr ID you can use ...

Twitter has become one of the most popular ever syndication and networking tools for bloggers. A few readers have asked if it is possible to add a "Tweet This" link to our Blogger templates, and while this was possible, I had not discovered a method of automatically shortening the URL of our blog posts until now. Luckily for us, Bit.ly have created a JavaScript-based solution which shortens the URL to just a few characters and enables bloggers to add a Tweet This link configured for their posts. In this tutorial, I'll explain how you can add this to your Blogger template so your readers can Tweet your posts to their Twitter followers, enabling your Blogger posts to be syndicated to a wider audience. Editing your template to add the Twitter links First of all, you should make a full back-up of your existing template (which you can later restore if you make a mistake in the coding). To do this, go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard and click on the ...

Have you noticed the new "Monetize" tab at the top of your Blogger dashboard?   This new section of our Blogger dashboards makes it easier than ever to integrate Google Adsense in our blogs and see just how much our blogs are earning. Google's Adsense kegiatan is a simple solution which many Bloggers use to monetize their sites. For some time now, Blogger have made it easy for us to include Adsense ads in the sidebar (as a page element) and around blog posts (as an option in the Layout>Page Elements section, when you click the "Edit" link for your blog posts).  If you have already configured Adsense in your blog by adding an Adsense page element to the layout, or enabling ads between posts, by clicking on the Monetize tab you will be able to see statistics for your earnings, like this: On this page, there are also links to view your Adsense Payment History, earnings reports and to switch the account associated with this particular blog. You can also...

When attempting to set up their Blogger custom domain, many Blogger users have received the following error message: Another blog is already hosted at this domain Although I have set up many custom domains to use with Blogger , until this weekend I had never experienced this issue for myself (and was unable to offer any definitive solution for those experiencing this problem). My friend was experiencing this very persoalan after setting up her new blog a few days ago. We have been able to find some solutions which I hope may help others who see this error message when attempting to set up their custom domain. Assuming you have already configured the DNS settings for your particular domain provider and have attempted to publish to a custom domain through your Blogger dashboard, here are the steps you should take: 1. Publish back to your Blog*Spot domain In order to make your blog accessible while troubleshooting your custom domain, it is advisable to publish back to your Blog*Spot...