The latest tips and news from the Blogger team
Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates
December 16, 2009
Earlier this year we simplified the process for monetizing your blog by
adding a “Monetize” tab
in the Blogger app. We started with AdSense, which allows you to add contextual advertising to your pages; more recently we
added AdSense for Feeds
to help you generate revenue from the distribution of your blog via RSS and Atom. Today we launched a third option: direct integration with Amazon Associates to search Amazon’s product catalog and add links to products that earn you commissions when your readers buy products you recommend.
With this feature, you can search Amazon directly from the Blogger editor and add pictures and links to Amazon products right into your posts. Your readers will earn you commissions whenever they buy the products you recommend, and if you don’t already have an Amazon Associates account, you can sign up for one for free without leaving Blogger.
If you’ve ever written a blog post about a book, recommended a gadget, or reviewed a toy you bought for your kids, you’ve likely gone through the process of drafting the post, opening up a separate window to go to find a site that sells the product, then going back to Blogger to paste the link to the product into the post editor.
Starting today, you can search the Amazon product catalog without leaving the Blogger interface and insert links to the products you find into your posts. Not only is the process of linking to products more efficient, but Amazon makes it easy for you to earn money whenever your readers actually buy the products you write about. This is known as an “affiliate program”, and it’s designed to let you recommend products you like to your audience — if they buy the product, you’ll earn a commission on that purchase. (For more on affiliate programs in general,
here is a good overview
at ProBlogger from this summer, and Darren’s “
11 Lessons Learned
” post about Amazon Associates is a good review of how to get the most out of the program.)
To get started, click on the Monetize tab for your blog and click “Amazon Associates”. Walk through the setup wizard, and add the Product Finder once you’re done.
Now for the fun part: when you are writing a post on Blogger, you’ll see an Amazon gadget to the right of your post editor (the “Product Finder”). You can search the Amazon product catalog from within Blogger — type in the name of the product you are writing about, and insert a link to the product, an image of the product, or an iframe containing the image, price details and a “buy it now” button. Every link that’s created contains your unique Associates ID, ensuring that Amazon will credit you for any purchases that result from readers clicking the link on your blog.
If you’re an existing Amazon Associate, completing this setup simply makes the Product Finder available on Blogger for you — you continue to earn the same referral rate from Amazon. New Associates receive the same referral rate from Amazon that they would have received if they signed up directly. If you’re not interested in earning a referral, you can still install the Product Finder: from the “Amazon Associates” page under the Monetize tab, click “I'll do this later — show me more Amazon options” and then click “Add the Product Finder” button.
A quick note about trust: affiliate programs work well when readers trust you. You should avoid promoting products simply because of the referral fee you might earn — readers may lose some of that trust if they sense your posts exist solely to make you money. You may also want to disclose to your readers that you will earn a commission on their purchase — some readers even prefer knowing that you benefit from their business.
There’s more information about this integration at
Amazon.com
, and
the Amazon Associates blog
has some more details. This integration is the result of months of collaboration between the engineers at both companies, and we’re very excited to share the results of this collaboration with you. Happy blogging!
Coming up Next...
November 10, 2009
by Helen Kang, Software Engineer, Blogger
Some of you must have wondered what the Next Blog link on the NavBar does, and clicked on the link once or twice. Next Blog used to take you to a random blog, written by a random blogger. Your fellow blogger could have been writing her blog in a language that you don't know how to read. Or you might be someone who likes to read about food and restaurants in Germany, but your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog.
We've made the Next Blog link more useful, by taking you to a blog that you might like. The new and improved Next Blog link will now take you to a blog with similar content, in a language that you understand. If you are reading a Spanish blog about food, the Next Blog link will likely take you to another blog about food. In Spanish!
You might discover a cool blogger who has hobbies similar to yours, has similar taste in electronic gadgets, likes sports that you're into, or has similar curiosities and interests. We will finish rolling out the new and improved Next Blog link over the next week and hope that you will enjoy discovering blogs that are likely to interest you.
This has been a fun, collaborative effort on the Blogger team and we've enjoyed the support we received from other Google teams. We really hope you enjoy the new, more relevant Next Blog as much as we do.
Blogger in Your Own Words
November 06, 2009
Last week we asked you for a few words to describe both the Blogger of the present and the Blogger you'd like to see in the future. You responded overwhelmingly, and now as promised we'd like to share the unedited results with you:
Blogger Today
(click for large version)
Blogger in the Future
(click for large version)
Thanks to everyone who pitched in their two cents; we're very excited to take your words and start writing the next chapter of Blogger.
(And of course thanks to
Wordle
for the awesome word clouds!)
Improving Our Communication of Blogger Service Interruptions
November 04, 2009
By Eddie Kessler, Blogger Engineering Manager
After a recent service interruption, we started talking about how we could improve our communications about these (hopefully infrequent) issues. Going forward, in the case of significant service interruptions, we plan to publish a post mortem on the
Blogger Status blog
within 3 business days to provide details about what went wrong and what we're doing to help prevent similar problems in the future.
During any outage, we try to keep the
Blogger Status blog
updated once we know about an issue. Of course sometimes — as was the case on Saturday — affected users who cannot reach Blogger cannot reach the Status blog either. In such cases, we will try to post updates on the
Blogger account on Twitter
to keep users apprised of what we know and when we expect a resolution.
We don't like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we're doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you. As always, thank you for using Blogger.
New Transparent Navbar Styles
October 30, 2009
by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger
As a blog author, you've probably spent more than a little time getting exactly the right "look" for your blog. A blog is an outlet for creative expression, and how your blog looks says as much about you as what is written on it. And we at Blogger are committed to giving you the tools to make a great-looking blog.
The Blog*Spot navigation bar ("navbar") is one area where we realized that there was some room for improvement. Our four traditional color scheme choices — Blue, Black, Tan, and Silver — are somewhat limited, especially if your blog's background color is
lime green
or
hot pink
.
That's why we have added two new color schemes — "Transparent Light" and "Transparent Dark." These new color schemes take advantage of the ability of modern browsers to render transparency (a technique known to web designers as "alpha blending"). This allows the navbar background to blend together with your blog's background color and pattern. The "Transparent Light" color scheme has a semi-transparent white background, producing subtle pastel colors, while the background of "Transparent Dark" is a semi-transparent black that produces a shaded look.
In addition, we've simplified and slimmed down the look of all the navbars, so that they will be more likely to harmonize with the aesthetics of your blog.
To enable the
Transparent Light
or the
Transparent Dark
navbar, go to
Layout | Page Elements
, then click
Edit
next to the navbar widget:
We had a lot of fun adding this feature and hope you like it too. Try it out!
The Next Chapter
October 23, 2009
As we close the chapter on the first ten years over here on Blogger, the team couldn't be more excited about the possibilities that lie ahead over the next ten. And while we've got some great things planned already, we know that the ideas and passion of the Blogger community will inspire us further. So in that spirit, we're going to once again ask for some help writing out the next chapter of Blogger. Only this time, we mean it quite literally :-)
We'd like you to take a second to think about where Blogger is today, and then where you'd like to see it in the future. What are some words that come to mind? How would you describe it?
Specifically, we're looking for six adjectives—three to describe the present, and three to describe hopes for the future. And when you've come up with them, please take a second to
let us know what you are thinking
. Once we've heard what everyone has to say, we'll follow-up here to share the results.
Once again, we really do appreciate your words!
Blog Action Day 2009
October 13, 2009
Guest post by Robin Beck,
Blog Action Day
This is Robin Beck here from Blog Action Day central, and I want to thank Rick and the Blogger team for helping support Blog Action Day 2009.
For those of you who don’t know, Blog Action Day is an annual event held every
October 15th
where bloggers across the world unite to write about a single issue on a single day. We like to think of it as one big blogfest for good, and our goal is to spark conversation on an issue of importance across the web.
This year’s topic is climate change, and we’ve thus far had more than
4,000 bloggers
from
123 countries
register, including many of the world’s largest blogs.
Our aim is to make Blog Action Day 2009 the largest social change event on the web as a demonstration of global concern about the climate crisis. To achieve this, we want to invite the entire Blogger community to get involved and commit to writing a single post about climate change on your blog on October 15th.
You can register your blog
here
.
In addition to joining thousands of other bloggers, you’ll also be supporting the work of the dozens of leading nonprofits who are also participating – including Oxfam, 350.org, The Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, The United Nations Foundation, and more than forty organizations affiliated with the
TckTckTck
campaign.
You can learn more about the issue of climate change and see sample topics you might write about at
www.blogactionday.org
. There you can also find additional ways to get involved by taking action with leading nonprofits and posting a snazzy widget to your blog.
Thanks so much for your support – we hope to have you all as part of the event!
Keeping Your Blog Secure
October 09, 2009
While October is to many a month of candy and costumes, it also happens to be
National Cyber Security Awareness Month
in the U.S. In that spirit, we thought we'd take a minute to look at a few different things you can do to make sure both your content and account are secure on Blogger.
Third Party Code
Adding site counters, templates, and other third-party code to your blog can be a great way to add some flare to your content, but can also leave your blog vulnerable to malicious activity if you aren't familiar with its source.
Over the years we've seen a number of third party scripts disguise themselves as helpful add-ons, when in fact they are performing a malicious operation behind the scenes. For example, a site counter widget may indeed be providing your blog with helpful tracking data, but at the same time may also be discreetly sending that information to advertisers for the purpose of collecting the online habits of your readers. A blog template you downloaded from a third party site might include pop-up ads or links to dangerous sites that install malware on visitor's computers.
The good news though is that most of the add-ons you will run across are perfectly legitimate. To protect yourself from the small minority of add-ons that are nefarious, we've put together a few tips to keep in mind when adding third party code to your blog:
Take a moment to review the code and look for anything that seems out of place.
For example, if you are adding a weather gadget to your blog and notice in the code that there are links pointing to unrelated sites, take that as a red flag and keep searching for another weather gadget. There is no reason that a weather gadget should include a snippet like
<a href="http://completelyfreemoney.com">Make Money Online!</a>
Before saving new template code, always preview first.
Malicious template designers may sometimes include pop-ups or other unexpected ads in the template code, which will usually be revealed with a quick preview. If anything unexpected shows up in the preview, go ahead and discard the new code by clicking
Clear Edits
.
Backup your template!
Whenever making significant changes to your blog's template, it's always a good idea to backup your content beforehand just in case you need to reverse changes.
You can easily do this from the
Layout | Edit HTML
tab by clicking the
Download Full Template
link and saving the .XML file to your hard drive. You'll then be able to revert back to this downloaded version by clicking the
Upload
button, also right under the
Layout | Edit HTML
tab.
Look first to 'trusted' code repositories for a new template or widget.
There are probably thousands of places across the web where you can find widget and template code, but it may be helpful to first check out some of the more widely known and trusted sources.
For templates, we've actually done a bit of scouting work already and collected a handful of great resources laid out
in this Buzz post
from earlier in the year. That collection comes from a number of well-established designers, and should provide plenty of secure template options to dig though.
For widgets and other scripts, there are a handful of places worth your time.
Mashable's 50 Great Widgets for Your Blog
is a very nice compilation that covers a broad range of categories.
Widgetbox
is another great portal to countless widget creations, all organized into easily browseable categories. Finally, Blogger's own Gadget Directory has hundreds of gadgets to look through. Simply click the
Add a Gadget
link under the
Layout | Page Elements
tab to access them all.
Permissions
Finally we thought it's worth touching on another security area which has proven problematic for some bloggers in the past, and that is your blog's
Permissions
settings.
Almost every day our support team receives reports from users who've been locked out of their own blog, the result of giving admin privileges to an unfamiliar blogger. Remember, you can always add more authors to your blog, but only extend admin privileges if you absolutely trust the person.
For more information about National Cyber Security Awareness Month, please check the
StaySafeOnline.org
page as well as the security series on the
Official Google blog
.
Post to Blogger with Google Sidewiki
October 01, 2009
Last week, Google Sidewiki
launched to the world
as an entirely new way to share information across the web. This new Google Toolbar feature allows you to contribute your own insight to any webpage, as well as read information shared by others right in your browser's sidebar.
Google Sidewiki uses a special relevancy algorithm to display the most helpful entries first, and also has built-in technology to display your entries on other sites which contain the same
snippet of text. For a more in-depth look at how it all works, as well as a full overview of all the features that Google Sidewiki has to offer, the team put together a very helpful page which you can check out
here
.
One feature in particular did catch our attention here on the Blogger team, and that is the ability to post your Google Sidewiki entires directly to your blog. You can watch a quick video tutorial of how it all works below:
So if you haven't already,
download the Google Toolbar
and give Sidewiki a try. As you come up with new ideas, submit them on the
Sidewiki product ideas page
!
Bloggers wanted!
September 25, 2009
Have opinions about Blogger? If so, we'd like to meet you. We are looking for participants willing to document their blogging practices over a few weeks and answer some interview questions. This will help us better understand your needs and keep improving Blogger.
Interested?
Sign up here
.
Thanks!
Show your face!
September 17, 2009
by
Lu Chen
, Blogger Summer Intern (Philadelphia, PA)
Last October we launched a
comments feature
that let you embed comments and the commenting form below your blog 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
.
We've also made it much easier to upload a profile photo when you leave a comment on a Blogger blog. From the comment preview, click "Add photo" to upload a photo to your Blogger profile. The next time you comment on a Blogger blog, your profile photo will be displayed next to your comment.
To enable or disable profile images in your blog's comments, go to
Settings
|
Comments
.
Cheers to photo-filled comments!
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
Turn Your Blog into a Book with Blog2Print
September 15, 2009
Guest Post by Caroline Vanderlip,
SharedBook
CEO
To continue Blogger's 10th anniversary celebration, I’m delighted to announce that Blog2Print has now
partnered with Blogger
. Blog2Print lets you publish some or all of your posts and photos as a professionally-printed, full-color book. Since 2007, thousands of Blogger users have become Blog2Print fans, using our easy and quick service to save and share all their favorite writings with friends and family or to keep a hard-copy version of their work. You can make books by season, by year, by event or even by theme, and you can choose from soft cover or hard cover versions of your book.
Your book from Blog2Print.com can include selected comments from your posts, and you can also add your own additional photos and new comments as you edit your book to make a unique edition for posterity.
Blog2Print is easy to use – just
enter your blog URL
, select the date range for the posts you’d like to include, and choose a cover from among the nine choices. You can add an optional dedication, and then click to produce your book. A table of contents will be generated automatically, and in a few seconds you’ll see a preview of exactly what your finished book will look like.
Best of all, Blog2Print books start at only $14.95 for a soft cover book. The base price includes 20 pages, but you can add as many pages as you like – just 35 cents each.
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
Widgetbox: Make a Widget From Your Blog
September 14, 2009
Guest Post by Will Price, CEO of
Widgetbox
In honor of
Blogger’s 10 birthday
, all of us at Widgetbox are excited to announce a partnership with Blogger that allows you to quickly and easily
turn your blog into a widget
. Whether you want to add your blog’s headlines to your main website, let your fans showcase your content to their audience, or you want a widget that helps make your content more discoverable across the web, Widgetbox-powered widgets will help you get the most visibility for your content, while eliminating the need for any manual updating or management.
For example, the Blogger Buzz widget below was made in seconds and includes posts, images, and Blogger Buzz branding:
Key Benefits?
The easiest way to build a widget from your blog
Colorful, interactive, and engaging
Easy to add to Blogger and sites across the web
As you update your blog, the widget automatically updates with the latest posts, headlines, and images
Helps you reach new readers and drive traffic back to your blog
How Do You Build Your Widget?
Building a widget
with Widgetbox is simple, easy, and fun. Simply:
Enter your blog feed
Design your widget’s look and feel
Publish the widget
Add it to your site and watch it spread across the web
Access statistics on unique views, widget installs, and other blogs and domains that have installed your widget
Tens of thousands of Blogger users have already made a widget from their blog on Widgetbox. Take your blog feed,
make it into a widget
, and share it with everyone. It’s that easy!
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
It's a date!
September 11, 2009
by Ross Peter Nelson, Software Engineer, Google Calendar
Do you have an event you'd like to invite your readers to? Thanks to Blogger Gadgets, this is now a piece of cake. Click the
Customize
link in the toolbar, and go to the
Layout
tab. There, you'll see the
Add a Gadget
link. The Event Gadget is currently one of the featured gadgets, or you can add it directly by clicking "add your own" and entering the URL
http://www.google.com/ig/
modules/calendar/socialevent/
bloggerevent.xml
. You'll then be taken to a configuration page that lets you enter information about your event. Once you click
Save
, it will be visible on your blog for everyone to see.
The gadget allows your readers to indicate whether they are going to attend the event, and lets them see which of their
FriendConnect
friends will be there too. In addition, anyone with a Google Calendar account can simply click a link to have that event added to their Google Calendar.
You can add multiple events to your blog as long as you give each one a different title or ID, and we'll keep track of who's attending which one.
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
You Might As Well Jump!
September 09, 2009
by Sean McCullough, Software Engineer, Blogger
It's time to announce another Blogger Birthday feature! Many users have been asking for an easy way to implement "Read more" links on their blog's index page. In fact, for years bloggers have been implementing "Read more" jump breaks themselves
by manually editing their HTML
--- a process that was complicated and error prone.
Today we are excited to announce our latest birthday present:
Jump Breaks
.
With Jump Breaks you can show just a snippet of your post on your blog's index page. Blogger will insert a "Read more" link to the full post page where your readers can keep reading.
There are a couple of ways to insert a "Read more" jump to your posts. If you use the
new post editor
(available on
Blogger in Draft
, or
by enabling it via the Settings tab
), you'll notice the "Insert jump break" icon in the editor's toolbar. Click this icon and the "jump break" will be inserted into your blog post at your cursor's position.
If you don't use the new post editor, you can still insert a jump break in
Edit HTML
mode by adding
<
!-- more -->
where you want to position the jump break.
Want to change the "Read more" text to something more your style? No problem. You can edit the "Read more" text by clicking
Layout
and then
Edit
the
Blog Posts
widget.
One more note, the Jump Break feature does not change how your post appears in your feed. You can configure post feed options by going to
Settings | Basic | Site Feed
, and editing
Allow Blog Feeds
.
Update
: Users that have customized their
Blog Posts
widget or otherwise have highly customized templates: You may need to edit your HTML to enable Jump Breaks. First,
back up your template,
then follow the instructions at the bottom of this
help article
.
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
One-click Blogging with BlogThis! Chrome Extension
September 09, 2009
by Chang Kim, Product Manager, Blogger
More and more of you are using Google Chrome (
more than 30 million active users now
!), and we want to let you know that a Blogger extension is included in the Chrome Extensions gallery. The
BlogThis! Chrome extension
is available now, one of several hundred extensions to be found in the
Chrome extensions gallery
.
Using the BlogThis! Chrome extension, you can start writing a blog post in one click. Whenever you are inspired by a web page you are looking at and want to blog about it, just click on the BlogThis! button on your Chrome toolbar, and the Blogger post editor opens up with a pre-populated link to the web page you were on. If you want to include any text in your post, simply highlight it before clicking on the BlogThis! button. Edit the post as you'd like, and publish it instantly or save it as a draft for future posting.
To try out the BlogThis! Chrome extension, first switch to
Google Chrome BETA
(if you are not already on that version), and install the BlogThis! extension by clicking on "Extensions" on your browser toolbar or visiting the
BlogThis! extension homepage
. Note: Extensions are only available for Chrome on the PC and Linux; Extension support on
Chrome for Mac
is under development.
Earn Charity Donations on Blogger with SocialVibe
September 02, 2009
Guest Post
by Joe Marchese,
SocialVibe
CEO
In honor of Blogger's 10th anniversary, we are excited to announce that you can now use your blogs to create positive, measurable social change. By adding the SocialVibe gadget to your blog, you'll be turning brand dollars into real charitable donations for the cause of your choice. The World Wildlife Foundation, Nature Conservancy, DonorsChoose, Invisible Children, and Charity:Water are just a few of the great charities you can support on Blogger.
Once you install the SocialVibe sidebar gadget on your blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the gadget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip). You can switch your cause and sponsor as often as you like, and receive regular updates from your charity about goal progress and impact. Thus far, SocialVibe has been able to raise over $500,000 for charities, and we know the Blogger community will be able to significantly increase this amount. In fact, we are setting a goal for the community to raise $50,000 before the end of the year (and remember, you don't raise money by taking money out of your pocket—or your audience's—but rather by getting your readers to engage with your SocialVibe gadget).
Adding the gadget is easy. Here's the low-down on how you can use your blog to make a big impact:
Step 1 - Add the Gadget
From your Blogger dashboard, click the Layout tab. Then, click the Add a Gadget link and click on "Featured", then select SocialVibe. (If you don't see it in the Featured gallery, follow
this link
, or click "Add your own". In the textbox, add the URL
http://www.socialvibe.com/s/blogger/gadget
.)
Step 2 - Configure Gadget
Here's the fun part. Choose the cause you want to support from the drop-down list. If you want to customize the size and title, you can do that here as well, and you'll see a preview of your gadget underneath. When you're satisfied, click Save.
Congratulations, your gadget has now been added to your blog! Your readers can help you earn for your cause by engaging with your gadget, and will even have the chance to leave you comments and add a SocialVibe gadget to their own blog.
The yellow overlay you see on your gadget is only viewable by you, the blog owner. Click on the link in the overlay to create a
SocialVibe.com
account and earn even more charity donations by adding it to other networks such as
Facebook
, MySpace or WordPress.
With SocialVibe, the Blogger community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world. Never before has making a positive social impact online been this easy.
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
There's an app for that!
September 02, 2009
We're very happy to announce today that Blogger now has a home on the iPhone. The team behind
BlogPress
(a popular app already available in the iPhone App Store) decided to build a free version of BlogPress just for Blogger users to celebrate Blogger's 10th birthday.
BlogPress Lite
packs many of the great Blogger features you have come to know into a simple yet powerful mobile application for blogging on the go.
Rich-text WYSIWYG editing, image uploads, labels, configurable settings, and auto-save are among the many features that are part of BlogPress Lite, as well as a handful of other optimizations for the iPhone experience.
Landscape editing
mode is supported and will feel very familiar for iPhone users, and blog posts are automatically saved when you have an incoming call—you won't have to ever worry about losing a post.
We're grateful to the team at InfoThinker for adding to the birthday "party." The app has been submitted to the App Store and should be available shortly. (We'll update this post when we see it.)
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
Share from Nav Bar
August 28, 2009
by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger (Mountain View, CA)
It's fitting that our newest birthday present was
announced first on Twitter
. Starting yesterday, the
Blogger Navbar
includes a new button: "Share."
When your readers are on your blog's home page, they can click "Share" to post the blog's URL to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. If they navigate directly to an individual blog post, clicking "Share" in the navbar also lets them share the post by email.
We've already seen some nice adoption of this new feature and hope this helps you build out your audience and share your story with the world. Here's a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you're using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you're getting from each source.
On the other hand, if you're interested in seeing which blogs people are sharing, head on over to Twitter search and
you can watch as people share blogs and posts that they like
. Don't forget to
follow us on Twitter
while you're there!
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
Let the Music Play
August 26, 2009
Earlier this year, a number of our users
complained about their experience
on the receiving end of a DMCA complaint.
Much commentary
at the time focused on claims that we were removing blog posts at the behest of music labels, that we were not notifying users, and that we weren't providing users with any recourse if they were linking to the music with permission. Though
we noted at the time
that we hadn't changed anything and were still following our documented policy, we realized that there was room for improvement. Over the next several months, we talked with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
and
ChillingEffects.org
, and reached out to a number of users to find out what they'd like to see in our policy moving forward. We're happy to make those changes our latest birthday present for our users.
First, a quick review:
the DMCA
is a U.S. law that says that a copyright holder (a music label, for example) can notify services like Blogger if they see cases where their content is being used without permission. Once we're notified by the music label and we believe the claim to be valid, we are then obligated to remove the content—otherwise we could be found liable for its continued use. Up until today, when we received a DMCA complaint, we would send an e-mail to the owner of the blog, forward a copy of the complaint (usually a fax) to ChillingEffects.org (more about Chilling Effects
here
), and delete the post.
There were several problems: first, some of our bloggers hadn't updated their e-mail addresses in years (
Blogger's been around a while!
). Second, ChillingEffects.org needed to review the faxes we sent to ensure that they weren't inadvertently publishing personal info, sometimes causing lengthy delays in the publication of the complaint. This meant that the blogger couldn't see the substance of the complaint—often for months. Finally, the post was gone! Posts that contained dozens, even hundreds, of links were removed from the Internet because of one link, and often the blogger didn't know the link wasn't acceptable.
Starting today, we've changed how we handle these situations:
DMCA Complaints are handled via a web form
.
This form
makes data intake easier, and makes it possible for us to share information with ChillingEffects.org without passing along personally identifiable information. It also allows us to notify affected bloggers more efficiently, as we provide information on not only the blog post in question but also the actual link(s) at issue.
Complaints are sent to ChillingEffects.org automatically
. ChillingEffects.org will have a copy of the complaint soon after Blogger receives it, making it possible for the blogger to find the complaint by
searching for their blog's URL
at ChillingEffects.org.
Blogger notifies affected users through their dashboard as well as by e-mail
. While we hope all of our users keep their e-mail addresses current so we can notify them in case there's anything important (hint, hint), we also went further by putting a big status message at the top of their dashboard to let them know about the DMCA complaint.
Blog posts are reset to draft status and are not deleted
. Now that users have the info they need to know specifically what the complaint was about, they can edit their post (found in their blog's dashboard status message, as well as by searching for posts in "draft" status) to remove the offending content and republish the post.
We realize this birthday present isn't for everyone—we'd hope most of you never receive a complaint. But music bloggers are a large segment of our users—and we know that for those who've received one or more DMCA complaints in the past, this may have been a frustrating experience. Please take care to remove the offending content once notified of the complaint—once you do, you can republish the original post so your audience will continue to have access to the other content contained in the post.
This was a cross-team collaboration between our legal, policy and engineering groups, and on behalf of everyone who helped make this change possible: happy birthday!
Rick Klau, Blogger Product Manager
Alice Wu, Google Legal Department
Steven Chen, Google Policy Team
Saurav Shah, Blogger Engineering Team
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
Partly cloudy, chance of labels
August 25, 2009
by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer, Blogger (Krakow, Poland)
In April, we
announced
that we wanted to hear from you about
your wish list for features
in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget.
Label Cloud
Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a "cloud" instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly:
Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels:
Selected Labels
If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose "Selected labels." You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget:
We hope you like it!
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
Sending Blogger some Birthday Cheer
August 20, 2009
by Brian Shih, Google Reader Team
If you use Google Reader to keep track of all the interesting Blogger blogs you're
following
, you might have run across something you really wanted to share on your blog. With Reader's
new Send To feature
, we've made it easier than ever to do this. Just head over to Reader's
settings page
and enable Blogger from the list of services:
Now, when you want to send a post to Blogger, simply click the "Send to" button and choose Blogger. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, "shift-t" will do the same. We'll send you over to Blogger with everything you need to write about the post. And that's it! We hope this makes it easier for you to blog about things you read in Reader - if you have feedback, please head over to
our help group
,
Twitter
, or
Get Satisfaction
.
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
Blogger is turning 10
August 17, 2009
A few months ago we mentioned that
Blogger was turning 10 years old
later this year. That day is almost upon us
—
just six days away in fact
—
and we've been hard at work trying to think about what we could give you to celebrate.
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. When we asked you to tell us your Blogger story, you responded:
you connected with far away family
,
shared your art
,
grew up
,
demonstrated your expertise in an emerging area of research
,
overcome childhood adversity
,
met authors and poets you admire
,
coped with an illness
,
became a parent
,
learned a new culture
,
struggled with your parents' divorce
,
placed digital messages in virtual bottles
,
helped people fix their cell phones
,
wrote a novel
. You even
made the inaugural blogging team at school
, and while there
you're working on your PhD on consumer trends towards blogs
. There are millions of such stories
—
and they grow by the day.
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
you asked for them this spring
. Other presents are because they meant a lot to us. And some are because our friends (both inside and outside of Google) wanted to chip in and give you something. In short, it's a lot like a real birthday: you won't necessarily want or need every present that you get, but keep in mind: it's the thought that counts!
We're excited to share this milestone with you. Stay tuned, the next several weeks will be a lot of fun!
Blogger Joins the Hubbub
August 17, 2009
When you publish a public blog post, you want to share it with the world—immediately! Blogger helps by feeding your posts to subscribers all over the web. Unfortunately, while we really want things to be as
speedy
as possible, sometimes it can take a while for the bits to travel through the intertubes.
We're happy to announce that Blogger has rolled out support for the
PubSubHubbub protocol
, which turns feeds into real-time streams. What does this mean to you? As feed readers adopt PubSubHubbub, your posts will surface immediately for their users. For example,
Google Reader has started rolling out support for PubSubHubbub
; when it's complete, your Blogger posts will surface in Google Reader as soon as you publish them.
FriendFeed
,
Livedoor Reader
(a feed reader popular in Japan), and
FavIt
already support PubSubHubbub—which means that their readers are already benefiting from this new feature.
Best of all, your blog is already broadcasting updates—you don't need to do anything to enable it.
Some more details: All blog post feeds now contain a "hub" element, and will ping
Google's hub
on every post update. If you're a developer writing code to monitor feeds and want to get updates efficiently in near real-time, you just need to detect the hub link and subscribe to the hub server. Then, sit back and let the hub push updates to you. To learn more about PubSubHubbub and start adding code to your project, see
the PubSubHubbub site
.
Thanks to
Brad Fitzpatrick
and
Brett Slatkin
who worked on a 20% project with the Blogger team to add this support over the past few weeks. We encourage any developer who wants to get a near real-time flow of updates from Blogger to use PubSubHubbub for their application—it's simple, efficient, and lightning fast. If you have questions, you can find answers in our
developer support forum
, or you can reach us on Twitter:
@blogger
.
This is one of many features announced as part of
Blogger's 10th birthday
. Happy Birthday!
Tweet Your Blog
August 03, 2009
Tweeting your new blog posts is a great way to engage your readers, and something that many on the team have taken advantage of for our own blogs. An easy way to do this is through
Twitterfeed
, which automatically updates Twitter with each new blog post. Here's how to set it up:
Head on over to the
Twitterfeed
site, click
Sign In with OpenID
and type in your Blogger blog's URL. Once you've registered you'll then be taken to the New Feed page where you can start linking blog feeds to your Twitter account.
First click the
Connect your feed to Twitter Account
button, which will prompt you to enter your Twitter login credentials to authorize Twitterfeed's access. You will get a nice little confirmation once you've successfully linked up your Twitter Account.
Next just enter a name for your feed, as well as your blog's
Feed URL
into the form. If you want to customize your feed's settings you can modify frequency, add prefixes, and even create keyword filters. Otherwise you're all set—click the
Create Feed
button and your Twitterfeed is enabled.
You can always come back later to the Twitterfeed site and modify your feed settings, as well as look at click-through metrics for existing feeds.
Contribute Gadgets to Blogger
July 08, 2009
(cross posted from
Blogger In Draft
)
Calling all Developers! We've just launched several extensions to the Gadget API that will enable developers to build more relevant and engaging gadgets for Blogger.
As you may already know, every Blogger blog is a gadget container. What's more, every blog is an OpenSocial gadget container powered by
Friend Connect
. This means that as a gadget developer you can leverage social APIs to build engaging tools for bloggers and their audience.
In addition to leveraging social data, gadgets can now
access a blog's post and comment feed
via new JSON APIs. For example, with this data you could easily build a map gadget that maps the geo-location of posts, or a "Most Commented On" gadget that ranks posts by the number of comments they've received.
Need to be inspired? Recently we asked our users what gadgets they most wanted to see in Blogger. Hundreds responded and
here's their wish list
.
When you build a gadget for Blogger, it becomes available to millions of active bloggers. Just submit your gadget to us, and within minutes it will surface in the Blogger gadget directory where users can easily browse, configure, and add your gadget to their blog's sidebar.
So now that you know Blogger is a great distribution platform for your gadget, what are you waiting for?
Get started building Gadgets for Blogger now
.
Important Note
: The APIs and documentation are new, so there may be bugs. Let us know by posting to the Blogger Developer Group if you run into problems developing your gadget.
Partner Profile: Lijit
July 06, 2009
Periodically, we profile a Blogger partner that can add functionality to your blog. This week we'd like to spotlight
Lijit
, a company building "search powered web applications for publishers" (that's you!). Lijit has made adding its "wijit" as easy as could be—just fill in your blog's URL and complete the sign-up wizard, you'll be good to go.
What does Lijit give you? For starters, Lijit provides a nice search tool for your site that will not only search your blog, but search the blogs of your friends, and all of the related sites (Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc.) that you and your friends use regularly.
Where Lijit shines is in the stats they gather for you: what are people searching for when they come to your blog? Once they arrive, what do they then look for? Where are they coming from? How has search traffic changed over time?
Best of all, Lijit lets you expose this info via a customizable "wijit" so that your visitors can see where other visitors are coming from and what they are looking for. To see this in action, take a look at Dark UFO's
Lost Spoilers site
, a Blogger blog focused on unraveling the mysteries surrounding the TV show Lost. The Lost Spoilers wijit shows not only the most recent searches that have brought visitors to the Lost Spoilers site:
It also shows a map of their visitors:
And finally it shows a list of the most recent visitors, their locations, and if they used a search to visit the site, the search term they used:
Interested?
Give Lijit a try
- just visit their site and you'll have it on your blog in just a few minutes!
Blogger is Turning 10
June 18, 2009
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog.
)
Google's about to have its
second tenth birthday
. In late August,
Blogger
will officially turn 10 years old. As our birthday draws near, we thought it would be interesting to share some fun facts about Blogger:
Every minute of every day, 270,000 words are written on Blogger
Millions of people worldwide use Blogger to publish to their blog each week
Almost two thirds of Blogger's traffic comes from outside North America (What's the #2 country after the U.S.? Brazil, followed by Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K.)
The most popular sport for our bloggers? Soccer (that's football to the rest of the world), more than four times larger than the #2 sport, baseball
While we're really excited about this milestone, we want the focus to be on you and the remarkable stories that you and millions of people around the world document on Blogger. After all, blogs are one of the true building blocks of the web, constantly updated not only with news and personal stories, but any kind of information you can imagine. Just this week, there's an Iranian student
documenting
the minute-by-minute proceedings in Iran, while a British woman is uploading
nightly blog posts
from her satellite phone while rowing solo from Hawaii to Australia, while an
American college student
is running from Amsterdam to Athens with nothing but the pack on his back. There are literally millions more.
What's your story? Did your blog help you find a job? Learn a language? Interact with your fans? Master a new skill? Battle an illness? Turn a hobby into a career? We read as many blog posts as we can, and what we do read is often brilliant. But we want to know more — we want to hear from you about what Blogger has meant to you over the past decade.
Do what you do best: tell your story. Write a post, and then let us know about it by filling out
this form
. Keep an eye on
Blogger Buzz
, where we'll be sharing some of our favorites over the coming weeks.
To the millions who have depended on Blogger to help you tell your story, thank you. To those of you who have yet to tell your story, creating a blog couldn't be easier: just visit
blogger.com
to get started. We can't wait to see what the next ten years bring — and stay tuned for details about the tenth birthday itself.
Zemanta helps you "blog smarter"
June 10, 2009
Image by
chucks
via Flickr
We're always looking for tools to make blogging easier, and a number of us on the Blogger team have become big fans of
Zemanta
. Zemanta is a browser plug-in for
Firefox
and
IE
, and is available as a bookmarklet for
Chrome
and
Safari
. (More details
here
, you can download your version of Zemanta
here
.)
Here's how it works: while you write your blog post in Blogger, Zemanta opens up a sidebar next to the Blogger post editor. After you've written a few sentences, Zemanta analyzes the words in your post and suggests images and video that are relevant to your post; with one click, it inserts them into your post. (The Zemanta screenshot from Flickr in this post was inserted with just that one click.)
In addition, Zemanta looks for words/phrases it's familiar with, and makes it easy to link those words to URLs it knows about. The phrases appear immediately below the post editor in Blogger, and by clicking on them you automatically create the links Zemanta recommends. No more highlighting text, clicking "Link", pasting the URL - just click the words you want linked, and Zemanta handles the creation of the link - to webpages, maps, videos or pictures.
Blogger Labels are easier to use with Zemanta, too: Zemanta automatically suggests labels for your based on the text of your post, and creates the labels for you if you like. Finally, "Latest Update" gives you a list of blog posts from other blogs writing about similar topics. It's a great way to discover sites talking about similar topics, and if you'd like to point your readers to those articles for further reading, clicking on them in the sidebar inserts them as "Related reading" links at the bottom of your post (see below).
If you have a few minutes, the following video review by Blogger user
Plug in SEO
does a good job covering how Zemanta helps save you time while enhancing your blog posts.
The blog post
accompanying the reivew is also worth a read.
We'll keep our eyes open for other tools that make your blog better. Stay tuned!
Related articles by Zemanta
Make Your Blog Posts Better
(lockergnome.com)
Zemanta Spreads To Safari, Chrome, Opera
(mashable.com)
Zemanta - the Coolest Application for Bloggers I Have Seen
(change-management-blog.com)
Blog More Effectively With Zemanta
(bloggingot.com)
Zemanta - Cutting out the middle man.
(toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)
Spruce Up Your Blog
June 04, 2009
Many of you have asked about Blogger templates. You've
posted in the help forums
, you've tweeted, one of our engineers actually got stopped in a coffee shop to talk about Blogger's classic templates. And by "classic" we mean "old". We found that many of you weren't aware of a wealth of third party sites offering quality Blogger templates, so we wanted to share some recommendations from your fellow bloggers about where they go for improved templates that work with Blogger.
Earlier this week,
I asked you for your recommendations
, and a number of you responded. In no particular order, here's what you suggested:
BTemplates
. A free directory of user-submitted templates, classified by type and/or features.
The Cutest Blog on the Block
. Run by Becky and Ashley of
2 Moms Talk
, this site offers free, premade layouts, as well as customizable backgrounds.
Blogger Styles
. Gallery of submitted templates, ranked by visitors and includes detailed configuration instructions.
FalconHive
. Conversions of WordPress templates upon request, along with archive of past conversions.
All Blogspot Templates
. Templates in 1-, 2- and 3-column options. Also includes AdSense-ready templates.
Zona Cerebral
. Spanish site with dozens of templates to choose from, including several converted WordPress themes.
Quite Random
. A number of free templates, and several Blogger-specific tutorials regarding setup and layout editing.
ChicaBlogger
. In Spanish, templates designed primarily for women.
Deluxe Templates
. Hundreds of templates, including many converted WordPress themes. Also has a nice "tips & tricks" section for customizing Blogger.
Pyzam
. Thousands of templates, browsable by category and sortable by recency or popularity.
Our Blog Templates
. 160+ free templates, all well-labeled for easy browsing to find the one you want.
eBlogTemplates
. Combination of free and premium templates, and a wealth of tips for tweaking your Blogger blog.
Note: for the most part, sites above provide templates for Blogger's "Layouts". If you still see a "Templates" tab for your blog, you need to upgrade your blog to take advantage of these new features.
This help article
has some more information about using Layouts.
Finally,
cheth shared a recent post he wrote
where he finds his favorite templates (many taken from the sites above). It's a good overview, and gives you a good visual indication of just how varied Blogger templates can get.
Now would be a good time to remind you that before you make any changes to your template,
you should download the current template and put it in a safe place
. (Click "Layout", then "Edit HTML" and then "Download full template".) And just in case it's not clear from this post: every link above points to a third party site.
Blogger cannot provide support for independently created templates
. If you choose to use a template built by someone else, make sure to figure out how easy it is to reach them if problems arise.
We'll have more to say about Blogger templates later this summer; in the meantime, thanks to everyone who shared a recommendation. We hope the list above gives you some variety when picking the next design for your blog!
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