Official Blogger Blog

Blog This!

June 15, 2011

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

One of the things I often hear is how challenging it can be to generate ideas for topics to write about. This may be especially true for popular blogs when you feel as though your followers are eagerly awaiting your next post. Sitting down and staring at your computer with the hope of feeling inspired can result in disappointment.

On my blog for example, I have a mix of posts that were authored be me, and articles that I've discovered elsewhere that I think may be of interest to others. Like many of you, there are times when I have things that I’m eager to write about, and other times when I just want to share something.

If this sounds familiar, you may find the “Blog This!” Chrome Extension of interest. It enables you post to your blog from any web page with just one click. The Extension is available on the Chrome Web Store under the “Blogging” category.

When you install the extension, a button will appear on your browser toolbar. Simply click the button to open Blogger in a new application window.

The new post is pre-populated with a link to the web page you're on, as well as any text you've highlighted on that page. Edit the post to your liking and post it instantly to your blog.

Happy blogging!

Announcing Blogger Mobile Templates

June 08, 2011

Posted by Jiho Han, Software Engineer

A few months ago we introduced mobile templates to Blogger in Draft. Today, we’re excited to announce that not only will these templates be available to everyone, we’ll be supporting all 27 Template Designer templates. We invite you to make your blog smartphone-friendly by going to the Dashboard > Settings > Email & Mobile tab and enabling the mobile template option.

Blogger mobile templates are mobile-optimized versions of our Template Designer templates. If you are using one of these templates, when you enable the mobile template option your blog will begin rendering using the mobile version of the same variant. Even if you are not using a Template Designer template, or using a heavily-customized version of one, you can still enable this feature to have your blog start rendering in a generic default mobile template that we have created.

Some of our feature highlights:

Preview: Get a glimpse of how your blog will be displayed by clicking on the Mobile Preview button. You can also see it on your smartphone by scanning the QR-code.
Automatic redirection: Viewers will see the mobile version of your blog when accessing from smartphones*.
Template support: We are now supporting all 27 templates. Some gadgets are also supported**.
Mobile ads: Mobile AdSense ads will be displayed at the top of the post pages and at the bottom of the index page if the blog has an AdSense gadget or in-line blog ads.
Comments and videos: Viewers on smartphone devices will be able to make comments and watch videos.

We hope you enjoy the mobile templates. As always, we would love to hear from you so please let us know what you think through our feedback form, and stay tuned for future improvements.

*WebKit-based mobile browsers are supported for this launch.
**Supported gadgets/elements in this launch: Header, Blog, Profile, AdSense, Attribution.

Add the +1 Button to Your Blog

June 01, 2011

launchedenable Share buttons on BloggerDesign > Page ElementsBlog postsEditShow Share Buttons

[Example of how a blog post +1’d by visitors appears on the Google search results page]

Add a virtual tip jar to your blog

May 19, 2011

Posted by Peng Ying, Developer Programs Engineer

Update 6/10: We've updated our gadget's Terms of Service and you will need to agree to these new terms before you can add or continue to use the gadget.

We know that most of you blog for the sake of sharing your thoughts and opinions, however a little side income is like an unexpected gift. Today we’re releasing a new gadget that allows your readers to directly contribute to your blog. The gadget can be added to any part of your page, but we’ve formatted it to fit best in the sidebar.

Setup is only five simple steps and should only take a few minutes of your time; just follow the steps below:

Sign up for a Google Checkout Merchant account at checkout.google.com/sell
Be sure to enable the HTML API by going to the Settings tab, clicking the integration link and unchecking the “My company will only post digitally signed carts” checkbox. Also, copy the Merchant Id for use in step 5.
Back in Blogger, on the Design | Page Elements tab click “add a gadget” where you wish to place the Support gadget.
Add the "Support My Blog" gadget from the gadget gallery.
Customize your support button settings. The Checkout Merchant Id is the one you copied down in step two. Save and you’re done!

Your supporters can now contribute to your blog. Clicking on the support button will direct your supporters to Checkout to complete the transaction. For an example of the support button in action, please visit the following blog:

http://bloggercheckout.blogspot.com/

Blogger is back

May 13, 2011

Update (5/31 7:45PM PST): We've published an incident report on Blogger Status.

Update (5/15 10:55PM PST): Blogger should be back to normal for the vast majority of people affected by this issue -- if posts are still missing, please check your drafts (you may need to republish). We are in the process of restoring comments made during the affected period from 7:37am PDT on 5/11 to 1:30pm PDT on 5/12. If you still have other issues, please contact us via the temporary form we’ve set up for this particular issue. Thanks again for bearing with us, we’re deeply sorry for the inconvenience we caused. We’ll share an incident report later this week.

Update (5/14 5:37 PM PST): We're making progress restoring comments, some blogs with a lot of content are taking a little more time. Thanks for bearing with us.

Update (5/13 7:46PM PST): Nearly all posts since Wednesday are restored, now bringing back comments from last couple days. We expect the comments to be back this weekend or sooner.

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored. Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation. We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish. We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring.

Again, we are very sorry for the impact to our authors and readers. We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we’ll do our best to prevent this from happening again.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger

Updates and Fixes, May 5th

May 05, 2011

Add location info to your posts with geotaggingbeen availableAdd Location

Save Location

Refreshed interface for image and video upload

A pair of Known Issues are now fixed

Users posting comments from non-Google accounts should no longer see the intermittent bX errors that occurred last week.

The intermittent errors which were preventing the browsing of archives via Newer / Older navigation links has been fixed.

An important note about legacy accounts

April 15, 2011

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

(This message only applies to a tiny fraction of users who haven’t logged in to Blogger since 2007. If you’ve logged in to Blogger at least one time since 2007, you won’t be affected and can disregard this message.)

There was a time early on in Blogger’s life where we had our own, custom account system for handling login authentication. Starting in 2006 all new Blogger accounts were created using the official Google accounts system, and then in 2007 we started the process of moving all of our legacy users over to the Google accounts system. Now, four years later, we’re finally at the home stretch of the transition. For a number of technical and operational reasons, we’ve decided to finally end our support for migrating legacy accounts and blogs after May 30th, 2012. So if you have a Blogger account and haven’t logged in since 2007, you will lose access to the account and associated content permanently unless you update to the Google Account system before May 30th, 2012.

Updating to the new account system is easy and should take just a few minutes. We really do value all of the content that has been created on Blogger and we hope that as many people as possible will reclaim their blogs. If you’ve been avoiding this task for a while, we encourage you to head over to the Legacy migration page and update your account.

We’ll be sending a similar notice later this week via email to all of the email addresses associated with the legacy accounts we have in our database. In a few weeks we’ll also make another announcement here on Buzz, with more specific updates on the transition.

If you have any other questions about this process, please let us know by posting your issue in the Login section of our Help Forum.

YouTube Us!

April 11, 2011

If it’s been a while since you’ve checked out the Blogger YouTube channel, you may want to head over and have a look around as we’ve given the whole site a facelift. Beyond our shiny new theme and graphics, we’ve added thirteen hot-off-the-press videos that cover a wide range of feature walk-throughs, handy tips, and other fun stuff that the team has come up with. And this is just the beginning!
We had so much fun putting these videos together that you can be sure to see a lot more uploads in the future, as we want this channel to be an ever-evolving source of Blogger information.

The Blogger team would love to hear your feedback on the new YouTube page, and we’ve created a form where you can pass along your ideas for further videos and other ways we can improve our channel. Of course, you can always send us a quick tweet or drop us a line in the Feedback section of our Help Forum as well.

Either way, we hope you enjoy our revamped channel and we look forward to expanding it over time.

Dynamic Views, the Chrome Extension

April 04, 2011

Posted by Mike Lawther, Chrome Engineer Last week we announced five exciting new ways to view your blog content, which take advantage of the latest web technologies to provide a richer experience for your readers. You can already see these views in action by appending /view to the end of any Blogger URL, but today we’re happy to announce another way to experience these views via the Blogger Dynamic Views Chrome extension.

Once installed, the extension will automatically detect when you are viewing a Blogger blog, and then display a Blogger icon (the orange ‘B’!) in your address bar which lets you select and view the blog in one of the five new dynamic views. It’s that simple.

Of course, you can always disable the extension whenever you want from the Extensions section of the Tools menu. Try it out today, and please feel free to leave a rating or review on the extension page.

Google to Acquire Blogger

April 01, 2011

Update: --Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Blogger CEOgoogle.blogspot.comQ: Why did Blogger sell to Google?Q: Will Blogger go away? Q: What does the acquisition mean to Blogger users? Q: Will there be any changes to my account? Q: Will there be any changes to the Blogger products? Q: What are your plans for the future? Q: Does this mean my blog will rank higher in Google search results? Q: What will happen to all the nice kids that work on Blogger? Q: Are you still as handsome as ever?