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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Blogger Team have released Product Ideas for Blogger : a lembaga based on the Product Ideas platform which enables us to suggest and vote on new Blogger features, gadgets and even Blogs of Note : One of the primary factors that drive innovation and improvements on Blogger is the voice of our users. We always take your feedback to heart, and we use it do help make Blogger the best service it can possibly be. Take a look at this screenshot to get an idea of how this lembaga works: We can log in to Product Ideas for Blogger using our Google account, then vote on existing suggestions by clicking the tick (vote up) or cross (vote down). When you choose a category (features, gadgets or Blogs of Note) you will be presented with a question you have not yet voted on, followed by the most popular suggestions. You can also get an idea of the ratio of "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" votes by looking at the vote bars to the right of the suggestions: It's also...

Some time ago, I was able to preview Susan Gunelius' new book, Google Blogger for Dummies , which is now available to buy from your local bookstore. After receiving my own copy, I've spent the past few weeks reading intently in order to provide you all with my full review of this "Dummies" guide. Blogger for Dummies ? The "For Dummies" series of reference books published by Wiley are complete guides on a range of subjects which present information in plain English. "Dummies" books are offered as complete guides on the given subject, where the information presented makes the subject easy to understand even for a complete beginner. In Google Blogger for Dummies , Susan Gunelius offers a simple and comprehensive approach for understanding and making the most of the Google Blogger platform. Chapters range from "Setting up your blog" right through to "Making Money With Blogger" and "Boosting your Search Engine Ranking"....

One of the functions most voted for in Blogger's recent Product Ideas forum was the ability to summarize blog posts on non-item pages. I've written about a few different approaches to this, but these methods were never so easy to implement. Luckily I came across this tutorial from Quite Random which offers the simplest - and most useful - method of displaying post summaries automatically for our Blogger posts, complete with a thumbnail from images used in our posts. This customization is very easy to implement (there are literally only two steps) with very little editing of the template required. I installed with immediate success on several templates to test it out, and with only a little tweaking on one of my most customized designs. In short, this is a fabulous implementation of post summaries for Blogger. Be sure to pop over to Quite Random to check out this post and learn how to install this hack for your own Blogger blogs. However... This is not my only sour...

Today marks ten years since Pyra Labs first unleashed Blogger onto the world! And how Blogger has grown: from humble beginnings to a multi-national, multi-lingual , Google-owned , highly powerful publishing platform which hosts over 300 million blogs (not counting those hosted on custom domains...). In celebration of this remarkable date, the Blogger Team have planned some wonderful treats for the Blogger community: Wait, what? What we could give you ? That's right. This is our birthday — but we're celebrating your contributions over the years. Over the past decade, millions of people around the world have made Blogger what it is today: a vibrant community of real people telling their stories. [...] As we turn ten, we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features on Blogger. Some presents are because Blogger Buzz ) Already a few...

As part of Blogger's 10th Birthday celebrations , the Blogger team have been hard at work developing enhancements and new features. Today, Blogger launched an enhanced "Labels" gadget which now supports label clouds, and allows us to choose which of our labels are displayed within the gadget: In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about Blogger Buzz ) Blogger's Label Cloud Label clouds are a popular way to display label lists in Blogger templates. Previously we have needed to use extensive customizations and JavaScript to enable labels to display in cloud format as opposed to a regular list, where the size of the font indicated the popularity of the label within the blog: Adding a label cloud to your Blogger blog is now incredibly easy! Simply go to Layout>Page Elements in your Blogger template and choose to add a new gadget in the area of your choice. Select the "Labels" gadget from the "Basics" menu, and you'll be...

Yet more treats for Blogger's 10th birthday celebrations were released for us today! An additional button in the Blogger Navbar now enables us to share our posts via Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and by email: When a reader clicks the "Share" link on your blog's home page, they can opt to share the URL of your blog by Twitter, Facebook or Google Reader. On item pages, the pop-up box includes the additional option to share by email: When readers share your blog and posts, additional parameters are added to the URL which helps you track the syndication of these posts using Google Analytics in the format "?spref=nn" where the nn part is changed to fb for Facebook, tw for Twitter or gr for Google Reader. For example: https://lovethemedownload.blogspot.com//search?q=share-from-nav-bar?spref=tw (sharing the announcement post on Twitter) http://www.bloggerbuster.com?spref=fb (sharing the homepage on Facebook) You can then search for URLs ending w...

One of Blogger's most requested features has been the ability to summarize our posts on home and non-item pages using some sort of "Read More" function. I'm thrilled to announce today that the Blogger Team have now enabled this for us to summarize our posts! No more laborious editing of the post HTML or template codes is required to display only summaries on our home pages :) The easiest way to test this new function is to use Blogger's new post editor, either by creating your blog posts through Blogger in Draft or by enabling this through the Settings>Basic tab of your dashboard. Once enabled, you should see a new button on the toolbar to insert a "Jump Break". Place your cursor where you would like the jump break to start in your blog post. If you prefer not to use the new post editor, you can simply insert <!--more--> in the place where you would like the jump break to appear. On non-item pages, a link to the full post will app...

the Blogger Team announced that this feature is now enabled for Blogger blogs , allowing us to see the profile image or avatar of those leaving comments on our posts: Today we have extended embedded comments to display profile images next to the comments that your visitors write. Though profile images have been available with the other commenting options, we are happy to bring them to embedded comments as part of the Blogger Birthday feature series (via Blogger Buzz) However , this feature currently seems available only to those using Blogger's default templates. Update :  Soufiane of LeBlogger.com has kindly emailed me with a quick and simple solution for us to add the required code to customized Blogger templates! Details below. For those of you using a standard Blogger template , you should easily be able to add comment avatars to your comment section with just a few clicks. Here is what you should do: Go to Settings>Comments in your Blogger dashboard, and ensure ...

This issue should now be resolved. I have checked the Twitter Updates gadget (plus others) on various sites, and am now assured everything should be back to normal. I've been made aware of the issues many Blogger users are experiencing with the Twitter Updates gadget. At present, this is showing "tweets" from the user @undefined and ignores user preferences for the number of tweets to be displayed. The same issue affects some of my other gadgets too: most notably, the Flickr, Picasa, TwitPic and Juitter gadgets. As far as I can tell right now, this issue stems from a sudden, random error affecting any gadgets utilizing User Preferences. These issues do not seem to be affecting every blog in which such gadgets are installed. The Blogger Team are aware of the issue and are investigating now. I'm also testing various changes to user preferences for my gadgets to see if a different solution to registering user preferences could resolve the issue for my gadgets. ...

After a hardworking weekend, I found an awesome treat in my feed reader this morning! Blogger in Draft today published details of the enhancements to the post preview feature of our blogs which enables us to see how our posts will look to readers: Up until now, when we preview a post we are writing for our Blogger powered blogs, we have seen only a white, format-less version of our musings, with none of the formatting and visual style which is added by our template and CSS. With this new feature in place, we can see preview exactly what the post will look like when published, including any style attributes generated by our template code. How it works The updated post preview feature is available to those using Blogger in Draft to publish their posts, though as it seems to be working well for everyone so far I imagine it will become available to those using the regular editor soon enough. This enhancement works similarly to the preview system offered by the Edit H...

Though I'm very busy finishing off the my ebook today, I couldn't let the day pass without posting this. Royal Pingdom have found Blogger to be the most reliable blogging service on the web. Without question. Of all the blogging platforms monitored, only Blogger delivered 100% uptime. Here's the full article for your perusal. Thank you Blogger Team! (Via Blogger Buzz )

Blog feeds offer a means of reaching a wider audience and allow our readers to stay up to date with the latest posts. Until recently, we had little control over how our feeds were presented using the Short or Long feed options available in our Blogger dashboards. Short Feeds display only the first 400 words, stripping that content of HTML and images, while Long Feeds display the entire blog post. Now the Blogger team have added a third choice to the length of our feeds , which we can use to display item content in feeds up until the Jump Break in our post . This enables any HTML-based content (such as images and links) will be displayed for each feed item, with a link to read the full item on summarized posts. To enable this new feed setting, go to Settings>Site Feed in your Blogger dashboard. Next to Allow Blog Feeds , choose the option in the drop-down sajian which says Until Jump Break then save this setting: Summarize your Blogger Post Feeds Now any subscribers t...

, Mobile View Although our Blogger sites can be viewed on most mobile devices, it can be difficult to effectively read blogspot sites due to the small screen size. To enhance our readers experience of Blogger blogs when viewed on Smartphones (and similar devices), the Blogger Team have enabled Mobile Templates as an opt-in setting through Blogger in Draft . Mobile Templates reformat the appearance of our blogs to include: Blog Title Recent posts with thumbnails and a preview snippet (which are linked to their item pages) Links to read the standard version of the site Mobile Ads (where the blog owner has chosen to display Ads beneath posts or in the sidebar) Comments (including avatars), scaled images and videos If you have chosen to use Blogger Pages and have added a Page List gadget to your template, this will be shown in the position it appears in your site. Which templates are supported? At present, six variants each of the Simple and Awesome templates are availabl...