The latest tips and news from the Blogger team
2007 Roundup
December 21, 2007
2007 has been Blogger's most amazing year yet! As you'll remember, we began it just after we had
taken the new version of Blogger out of beta
. Here's a quick run-down of many of the fun things we did since then:
Domain
association
and purchasing
Hindi transliteration
Blogger Photos
in Picasa Web Albums
26 new
languages
widgets:
Videobar, Newsreel
,
Header Images
,
Polls
,
Search Box
,
Google Gadgets
,
Slideshow
, Subscriptions Links
1000th Blog of Note
Old Blogger shut down, New Blogger for all
, and Blogger's
8th birthday
Autosave
Profile Search
Blogger in Draft
Video Upload
Feed
Enclosures
and
Redirects
Blogger Play
Comments:
Subscribe via Email
,
OpenID
If you're not using any of these on your blog, click through to the various
Buzz
posts and
Help
articles that explain them, and check them out — they're really nifty. And many thanks for sticking with Blogger through the
transition
to the new version earlier this year — it's a powerful and scalable platform on which we'll be building lots of exciting new features in 2008!
You Blog, We Listen
December 20, 2007
Two fixes just went live, before we sign off for a brief holiday break:
Unregistered commenters can once again provide an auto-linked URL
[
Help Group Thread
]
Images in the Header page element will no longer be cropped vertically
[
Help Group thread
]
We apologize for having broken these features for you. Your blogs and Help Group posts showed us the true extent to which you used and cared about these features, so please
let us know
if they're still being problematic.
Thanks for your patience!
OpenID Commenting
December 13, 2007
After just two short weeks of testing on
Blogger in draft
,
OpenID
commenting is now available for all Blogger blogs
. This means that your friends and readers can leave authenticated comments on your blog using their blog URLs from
OpenID-enabled
services such as
WordPress.com
,
LiveJournal
, and
AOL Journals
, or with their
AOL/AIM
accounts.
We've chosen a few popular OpenID providers to highlight on the comments form, but OpenID is, well, "open"! You can
use any OpenID service
to post a comment by choosing "Any OpenID" and filling in your OpenID URL.
You'll see the OpenID icon (
) next to the names of commenters who posted with their OpenID. This icon assures you that the person who posted the comment is the same person blogging at the URL their name links to.
Say goodbye to comment spoofing!
Turning on OpenID commenting on your blog
If you've set your "Who Can Comment?" setting to "Anyone," OpenID will be enabled on your comments pages right now! To change your comments settings, go to your blog's Settings | Comments tab in Blogger, and select "Registered Users" or "Anyone" in the
Who Can Comment
setting:
Getting an OpenID URL for your site
Blogger provides helpful shortcuts to WordPress.com, LiveJournal, TypeKey, and AOL, but
you can use any URL that you control as your OpenID URL
by using
delegation
.
For example, say you have a LiveJournal account with the username "brad." This gives you an OpenID URL at
http://www.livejournal.com/users/brad/
. You could comment with this URL, but you'd rather have your comments link to your homepage at
http://bradfitz.com/
.
By copying two lines of HTML into the
<head>
tag of
http://bradfitz.com/
, you can turn it into an OpenID URL. Then, you can use
http://bradfitz.com/
to sign your comments, while logging in to LiveJournal when you do so.
Delegation gives you complete control over what URL you use to represent yourself online, and complete control over what service you want to use to login with. Sam Ruby wrote a great
article about OpenID
delegation that we recommend if you're interested.
LiveJournal, AOL, WordPress.com, and TypeKey aren't the only OpenID providers out there. If you need an OpenID account, you can also get one from
myOpenID
,
Verisign
, or any other service that implements OpenID.
The "Other" URL field
Right now, the only way to add a URL to your name when commenting is to sign your comment with OpenID. We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from
launching OpenID support
on
Blogger in draft
.
Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. We regret this appearance, since we're strong supporters of OpenID and open web standards in general.
If you haven't set up OpenID, you can still link to your blog — or any webpage, for that matter — by using the standard <a> tag inside the comment form.
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