The latest tips and news from the Blogger team
Friend Connect: Grow Your Blog's Community
February 27, 2009
A few months ago, we
introduced a feature called Following
, which lets readers publicly subscribe to your blog. Since then it's been incredibly successful: nearly three million communities in 39 languages have followers, and every second of every day, a reader follows a blog.
But 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. Each site that a follower joins will show up on their Friend Connect profile. Now your blog will benefit from increased exposure as your readers interact with other sites around the web - and their friends see your blog listed as one they've chosen to follow. (
Check out how to follow a blog
)
Blogs that are using the Following feature have automatically been migrated to Friend Connect, so you don't need to do a thing. And be sure to stay tuned - over the next several months, there are a number of additional features coming to Blogger as a result of today's Friend Connect integration.
One note for readers who previously followed one or more sites with Blogger Following and joined one or more sites with Friend Connect: you can decide whether or not to show the sites you've joined via Blogger Following and Google Friend Connect in your Blogger profile. By default, we have turned the "Show blogs I follow in my Blogger profile" option off. If you change your mind, here are
instructions
for making this list of sites public on your Blogger profile.
Update Feb. 26, 2009:
For sites whose follower counts have decreased,
here is an explanation
that goes into more detail about the decision to make certain followers private.
Facebook Your Blog
February 12, 2009
Over the years we've heard lots of great ideas for promoting your blog, and have been compiling them
here
as a handy reference. From simply adding links to enabling cool newer features such as
Following
, we're always happy to update the page when we stumble across something new.
Our latest addition comes from our friends at TypePad, who have put together a great video on
How to add your blog feed to your Facebook profile
. After trying this ourselves, we've found that integrating your blog feed into your Facebook profile can be a really effective way to keep your friends updated on the latest from your blog.
So if you've been looking for slick new ways to expand your blog's audience, check out the video and give it a shot!
Blogger in 140 characters or less
January 09, 2009
With several Twitter fans on the Blogger team (not to mention a number of Blogger alumni work at Twitter), it seemed only natural that
we set up shop on Twitter ourselves
. We will be posting status updates, major feature announcements, and pointers to cool uses of Blogger will all show up in our Twitter account. We will do our best to keep an eye on replies to @blogger as well, but our
Help Center
and
Blogger Discussion Group
remain the best places for help from fellow users as well as the Blogger support team.
Your blog, your data
December 10, 2008
Today’s release features a brand new graduate from the Blogger in Draft testing ground:
Import and Export
for Blogger blogs.
The import/export feature opens up a whole new range of portability for your blogs, as well as allows for a few new options in the blog creation process. To get you started, we've rounded up a handful of ideas that can be done with importing and exporting:
Merge two or more blogs into one.
Have a few scattered blogs and want to get a fresh start? Now you can combine comments and posts from multiple blogs into a brand new blog.
Move individual posts from blog to blog.
Cross-publish your posts on multiple blogs, or transfer large batches of posts from one blog to another with a single click.
Back up your blog to your own storage.
It's never a bad idea to create backup copies of your own content, and now you can easily export an archival copy of your blog to your hard drive with a simple tool.
Move your blog somewhere else.
Our standard Atom XML export format will open up new blogging channels between providers, and let you take your content with you should you decide to move somewhere else. And of course, if you decide to come back to Blogger, importing your export file will get you back up and running in seconds.
You can access Import and Export from the
Blog Tools
section on the
Setti
ngs | Basic
tab.
We have also added new importing options to the blog creation process:
For some more detailed info on all of the things you can do with
Import and Export
, please check out our accompanying
help article.
A couple caveats
Currently we only support importing Blogger blogs. We don't yet support importing from WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal or any other blogging platforms.
Before importing a blog for the first time, we recommend that you create a new, throwaway blog to import into so you get a sense for how the process works. Once you’re comfortable, import into your public blog.
If you have enabled a content warning for your blog, then you will have to remove it before your blog can be exported.
iLike: Add a soundtrack to your blog
December 05, 2008
Sometimes we stumble across gadgets that are just too cool to keep to ourselves. And such is the case with the slick
iLike gadget
, which should be a real treat for all of you Blogger audiophiles out there.
iLike
brings music to your blog by letting you embed and share playlists that you make yourself. Using their simple interface, you can organize and arrange your tunes, then seamlessly integrate them into your blog's sidebar.
To get started, head on over to the
playlist editor
and build up your list of tunes from the iLike database. When you are finished, simply click the orange
'Done!'
button at the bottom of the page, and you will be taken to a preview of what your playlist will look like on Blogger.
If everything looks good, click the orange
'Add to Blogger'
button to go to Blogger's Import Page Element Page (if not already signed in you will be prompted to do so.) Then choose the blog which you want to have the playlist, and click
'Add Widget.'
The iLike gadget will now show up in your blog's page elements editor for you to arrange as you wish. Pretty cool, eh?
Keep in mind though that playlist editor feature of iLike is still technically in beta, so the usual caveats apply. However, if you are feeling extra entrepreneurial you could help out the iLike dev team by answering their
quick survey
.
Reactions: easily engage your readers
November 06, 2008
One of our goals at Blogger is to make it easy for authors to get feedback on their content; we believe that authors are driven in part by the reactions and criticisms offered by their readers, and that these interactions enhance the quality of blog content. In support of this effort, we're launching
Reactions
, simple annotations chosen by authors and given by readers.
With Reactions, readers can easily respond with one click, increasing feedback on posts.
Photo by
Kevin Steele
To enable Reactions, log in to your dashboard, go to
Layout > Page Elements
and click the
Edit
link in the
Blog Posts
element to open the blog post configuration tool. Then, check the box next to
Reactions
, edit your reactions as a comma-separated list, and click
Save
.
Reactions works with Layouts templates, though if your template is heavily customized, you may have to reset your widget templates for Reactions to appear. If you have a Classic template you will need to
switch to Layouts
to use Reactions.
Of course, Reactions isn't the only way to gather great feedback from readers; we also recently launched the
Embedded Comment Form
. With both Reactions and better commenting, we aim to make it easier for you to get the response and adoration you deserve.
Try Reactions now! We hope your reaction is
<
3
.
Updated, 2:30 PM:
Corrected to say that Reactions is a Layouts-only feature.
Blogger.com - more like a big truck, less like a series of tubes
November 06, 2008
Here at Blogger we’re always working to make the site and your blogs faster and more reliable. We want you to think of us as a
big truck
: able to handle anything you can dump on us.
Tuesday’s election
was a good chance to see just how big a truck Blogger actually is, and we’re happy to report that Blogger-hosted blogs, for the most part, held up under the record-setting traffic.
That being said, there were definitely some hiccups (potholes?) along the way. Our favorite political and polling analysis blog,
FiveThirtyEight.com
, received an order of magnitude more visitors than the next most visited blog. They also received more than
50 times
as many comments as the next most commented-on blog. Unfortunately, this traffic caused some publishing delays for Nate and Sean as well as some intermittent slowness on their site.
After we got word of the trouble, we were able to shift some resources around to keep things running fairly smoothly for the rest of the night. Now that traffic has calmed down, our engineers are hard at work tuning and improving Blogger based on the experience.
We’d like to thank bloggers, commenters, and readers for participating in one of the biggest blogging events ever. Your voices validate what we do, and every day we look forward to making Blogger faster and better for you.
Welcome AOL Journals Users!
October 27, 2008
As some of you might know, AOL has recently decided to sunset its
AOL Journals
service. To help Journals users continue to share their thoughts online, Blogger has built a simple
migration tool
to move an AOL Journal to Blogger. We'd like to welcome our new Blogger users to the community and are looking forward to hearing what they have to say!
We've been hard at work here at Blogger and have added a number of new features in the past few months. If you're a Journals user who wants to explore our features, or even if you're already a Blogger user but you want to see what's new, check out our
features page
. Over in our
user group
you can share your blog with others or find new blogs to
follow
. If you're still hungry for more blogs, the Blogger team regularly posts interesting and noteworthy Blogger-powered blogs at
Blogs of Note
.
Below are some more resources for new Journals users. Welcome again!
Take a Tour
Help Resources
User Group
Commenting made easier
October 22, 2008
Today we’re bringing the
embedded comment form
out of
Blogger in draft
and making it easily available to everyone. This feature puts the comment form at the bottom of each post page, below the comments, instead of on the separate, Blogger-styled page.
The embedded comment form is more convenient for your readers because they can use it to
post a comment immediately
, without clicking over to a different page. It also looks better, since it
matches your blog’s style and colors
.
If you’re logged in to Blogger with your Google Account, you can also subscribe to comments via email by clicking the “Subscribe” link. Unlike with the full page comment form, you don’t need to post a comment to subscribe.
To enable the embedded comment form for your blog, go to the
Settings > Comments
page and look for the
Comment Form Placement
setting. Change it to
Embedded below post
, save your settings, and go check out a post to see the new form in action.
The embedded comment form works on both Classic and Layouts templates, though if you’re using a heavily-customized Layouts template you may need to reset your widget templates before the embedded comment form will appear.
We think that the embedded comment form is a big improvement, so we’ve made it the default setting for all new blogs.
Happy commenting!
Update, 10/23:
We regret that this feature is being enabled for some existing blogs that didn’t specifically enable it. We are working to undo that, but in the meantime if you see this on your blog and don’t want it, go to
Settings > Commenting
and change Comment Form Placement to either “Full page” or “Pop-up window.”
Publish to your Blogger blog from iGoogle
October 22, 2008
Today, we’re releasing our
Blogger Post Gadget
for
iGoogle
. Now you can edit and publish posts directly from your custom iGoogle homepage, making it even easier to share your thoughts with the world.
To get started, just click that “+
Google
” button to have the Blogger Post Gadget added to your iGoogle page.
You can use HTML in the text box, but if you want more rich text editing — for example, to upload a photo — just click “Save Draft” and you’ll get a link to edit the post in the full Blogger post editor.
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