New mobile templates for reading on the go

Posted by Jiho Han, Software EngineerWe know many of you like to view blog posts on your smartphones. However, it can be difficult at times because of the small screen size. This is why we are excited to announce our first launch of mobile templates! Initially available as opt-in functionality on Blogger in Draft, mobile templates will re-format your blogs for smartphones to enhance your readers’ viewing experience. In order to activate mobile templates,...

Read More

Search and Insert YouTube Videos

Blogger supports drop-dead easy video-blogging -- if you have a video file, you can just upload it to Blogger. But when it comes to video-blogging, we know a lot of you also choose to embed YouTube videos to your post.Currently, adding a YouTube video to your post is fairly easy, but it still requires several steps of work: If you don't have the embed code already, you'd have to open a new browser window or tab, go to YouTube.com, search the video,...

Read More

More Fonts Means More Choice

Posted by Wongoo Lee, Software Engineer Self expression is a beautiful thing.  It’s one of the best things about having a blog—a place where you can control the look and feel of your message and how it’s presented.  Today we’re excited to announce another amazing way to make your blog truly you—Web Fonts. The Web has traditionally been pretty limited when it comes to font selection, especially for non-Latin alphabets such as Cyrillic and...

Read More

New Stats Gadgets

Posted by Wiktor Gworek, Software EngineerUpdate, 9/29: Based upon your feedback, we've added two gadget options:In the Popular Post gadget, you can now choose the number of posts you want the gadget to displayIn the Blog's Stats gadget, we've added an option to let you choose the time window of your pageview counts (All Time, Last 30 days, Last 7 days)---After we launched the Blogger Stats to Blogger in Draft, we’ve made some improvements...

Read More

Use Your Own Photo for Your Blog’s Background

By Wongoo Lee, Software EngineerAfter we launched the Blogger Template Designer, one of the most requested features was the ability to upload your own background image. Though we provide hundreds of professional stock photos from iStockPhoto, we know many of you are serious photo buffs and would like to use your own beautiful photo as your blog’s background image. And now you can! Go to Design | Template Designer | Background, click on Background...

Read More

Introducing Blogger Stats

Posted by Staszek Paśko and Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineers(Update 08/30: We’ve made these improvements to the Blogger Stats, based on your feedback and suggestions.)Self-view exclusion: You can now exclude your own visits by clicking on “Don’t track your own pageviews” link on the Stats | Overview page. We’re also now excluding traffic coming from Blogger admin admin pages and post Preview, providing more accurate pageview data. More effective...

Read More

Better Post Preview

Posted by Jaesun Park, Software EngineerMany of us preview our posts multiple times before we are satisfied with them for public viewing. Blogger in Draft now supports a new, improved preview feature that allows you to see how your post will actually look to your readers.On the New Post page, click on the Preview button (this is a new button that we’ve just added), and you will see a new window open with the WYSIWYG preview of the post. This is...

Read More

Panoramio Widgets let you add photos from around the world to your blog

Posted by Roger Trias i Sanz, Panoramio Software EngineerToday the Panoramio team launches the Panoramio Widget API, an easy way to publish photos of your favorite places right on your blog. Panoramio is a collection of user-submitted images from around the world. With the Panoramio Widget, you can share photos of places visited in your far-off travels, or of your favorite local haunts.To add Panoramio to your blog, you’ll need to add a bit of HTML. We always recommend adding HTML via the HTML/Javascript gadget (Layout > Page Elements >...

Read More

Template Designer: Color theme matching, faster in IE, variable-width support

A few quick pieces of news about the template designer and the new templates:Choosing a new background image will shift the main color theme to try to match it. You can of course tweak the color theme or specific colors afterward, but this offers a nice starting place. Works best on the Simple and Picture Window variants that have a background color in their headers.We’ve temporarily disabled the “retrofit” code that adds rounded corners and drop shadows on Internet Explorer. Its current implementation was causing some pretty dramatic freezes on...

Read More

Small Template Designer Tweaks: Two More Variants and Bug Fixes

Last week we updated the Blogger Template Designer with two new variants for Simple, some minor tweaks, and bug fixes. Here’s what you can expect:Simple gains two more variants, one that’s, well, bookish, with serif text and an image background, and another with a full-width background image behind the header and tab regions. Try them out, let us know how they work for you.Links from the background image picker directly to iStockphoto so you can...

Read More

Better Photo Uploading

We recently updated the photo uploading interface in Blogger in Draft’s post editor with a few new features:Multiple photo upload. If you have Flash installed, you can select multiple photos at a time in the file picker, and all of them will get uploaded at once.Picasa Web Albums integration. You can now select from any of the images in your Picasa Web photo albums and insert them into your posts.Tips from the Blogger Team:You can upload multiple images at once, but then only insert them into your post one-at-a-time. When you re-open the image...

Read More

The Blogger Template Designer

We’ve added a fair bit to Blogger over the years, but one thing that’s been constant for some time has been our collection of templates. While a number of talented designers around the web have offered their own fresh and interesting designs that you can apply to your Blogger blog, our stock set has grown a bit stale, and you’ve noticed. You let us know — in the forums, on Twitter, sitting next to us on airplanes, even from across the counter at...

Read More

Improvements to Blogger In Draft's Text Editor

by Jiho Han, Software EngineerWe've made a couple of improvements to the Text Editor on Blogger in Draft! Add captions to your photos Now you can easily add captions to the images you include in your blog posts! To add a caption, simply click on the image you've inserted, and click Add caption.Then you can write your caption just below the image. Expandable Edit RegionIn addition to captions, we've recently added another new feature...

Read More

Pages come to Blogger In Draft

by Sean McCullough, Software EngineerUpdate (1/21 @ 8:54am PST): We've temporarily disabled creating & editing pages. You can still view the pages you've already created. We will re-enable ability to create and edit pages soon.Update (1/21 @ 9:32pm PST): Pages are back on.Pages have been a top requested feature, and they are now available on Blogger in Draft! Blogger Pages lets you to publish static information on stand-alone pages linked from...

Read More