New Feature: Gadgets

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Friday, 13 February 2009

Autosave and Automatic Date and Time

Posted on 10:54 by Unknown
We’ve recently added two new features to the post editor on Blogger in draft: autosave and automatic date and time.

Autosave is a feature we’ve had for a while on the old post editor, and it does what you’d expect: automatically save your draft posts when you pause in your typing. We’ve brought the same convenience and safety to the new post editor.

With automatic date and time, your posts will now be timestamped with the date and time that they’re published, not the date and time when you first opened the post editor (as has been the case). You can of course still explicitly set the date and time by opening Post Options and switching to Scheduled at instead. Once a post is published, it will keep its date by default, even if you go back even if you go back to edit the post and re-publish.
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Posted in homepage, new post editor | No comments

Wednesday, 10 December 2008

New feature: Geotagging

Posted on 13:14 by Unknown
We’ve just added geotagging to the new post editor on Blogger in draft. With geotagging, you can add a location to your each of your blog posts. Just as time stamps help readers find posts from a certain date or time, geotags give your readers a way to browse posts near a specific location.

Adding a geotag to your post is easy. Log into draft.blogger.com, open the post editor, and click the add location link below the main text field.

Use the location editor to search, drag, click and zoom on a map to choose and save a location. We’ll try to label the location you choose using our reverse geocoder, which looks up a name for a point on the map. You can also edit the location name by clicking the blue location name text below the search field.

When you publish your post, the geotag is displayed below your blog post as a link, which will open up Google Maps.

We also include each post’s location in your blog’s RSS and Atom feeds using GeoRSS, a standard for geotagging. This means that feed readers, map applications and search engines can associate your posts with their locations.

We’re still working on other ways to show geotag information on your blog. Brian, the Google engineer who created this feature in his 20% time, has written a gadget that will display your posts on a map. To add it to your blog, click “Add Your Own” on the “Add a Gadget” page and paste in this URL: http://blogmap-gadget.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/blogmap.xml

Geotagging has a few known issues. We'll be addressing them shortly, but here are some suggested workarounds for the near-term:

  • The location editor is hidden behind the text field in the Edit HTML tab. Please switch to the Compose tab to view and edit locations.
  • A geotag cannot be removed from a post once it has been saved. If you need to remove a geotag, please copy your post content into a new post and delete the geotagged post.
  • Update 2:33pm: If you have a customized template and you don't see the "Location:" byline, you may need to reset your blog's widget template. Do this by going to the Layout > Edit HTML tab in your dashboard, and then clicking Revert widget templates to default below the main text field.
  • Update 2:33 pm: Some users are having issues with the blog post map gadget. Brian is investigating.
What types of posts are you adding a location to? What other functionality would you like to see in this feature? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!
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Posted in geotagging, homepage, new post editor | No comments

Monday, 24 November 2008

Help us test Import and Export

Posted on 19:09 by Unknown
This summer, we launched Import / Export on Blogger in Draft. The feature lets you export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one.

Over the last few months we've gotten a lot of feedback and made a number of improvements (we now support very large blogs!). We think it's just about ready for prime time.

Please help us out once more by trying Import / Export on Blogger In Draft.

  • How to use Import / Export (note: You'll need to export your blog before you import it)
  • Report issues with the feature
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.
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Friday, 14 November 2008

New Feature: Contact Picker

Posted on 09:40 by Unknown
We’re making it easy to use your existing Gmail contacts in Blogger. We’ve added a “Choose from contacts” link below some of your blog’s settings fields, such as Comment > Comment Notification Email and Email > BlogSend Address. Click the link to bring up a window with your Gmail contacts list.

Currently we don’t have the picker built in to the Permissions settings, but we’re working on it.

Finding your contacts ok? Any problems? Let us know in the comments.
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Posted in contact picker, homepage | No comments

Tuesday, 23 September 2008

Feature Updates and Bug Fixes for September 23rd

Posted on 10:17 by Unknown
We’ve just released a few fixes to some of the features currently here on Blogger in draft.

Reactions gets some visual improvements, including fixes for display in IE 6 and overall spacing fixes. We’ve also tweaked the HTML and images to make it load a bit more quickly.

We’ve fixed an Import / Export bug that was truncating the export of comments. Also, importing scheduled posts will keep them scheduled instead of publishing them immediately.

We’re bringing the Embedded Comment Form closer to feature parity with the full page comment form by adding e-mail subscription for follow up comments. If you’re logged in, you can now also subscribe to comments without posting one of your own. We’ve also added improved color matching in the form for all browsers.
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Posted in embedded comment form, homepage, import export, reactions | No comments

Thursday, 14 August 2008

Features and Bug Fixes for August 14th

Posted on 18:00 by Unknown
Today’s release to Blogger in draft brings one new feature: Reactions, which are customizable one-click buttons below your posts. Read more on our announcement post, and try them out on this blog.

We’ve added better show/hide controls and brought back the post count and Blogs of Note to the new dashboard, and published it to the main Blogger site.

In case you missed it, we moved Google Gadgets and the gadget directory to the main Blogger site as well.

This release also has some fixes to other Blogger in draft features:

New Post Editor
  • Edit HTML mode now has a toolbar.
  • The Compose toolbar gets a fifth font size, and “Normal” should now more correctly match the font size on your blog.
  • Newly added images will correctly pick up the border styles from your blog’s template.
Import / Export
  • Basic settings are now saved and restored.
  • Templates (both Classic and Layouts) are saved and restored.
  • Exporting a blog will now cause the XML file to download in Safari.
  • Import blog messaging now distinguishes between published and draft posts.
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Posted in homepage, import export, new dashboard, new post editor, reactions | No comments

New feature: Reactions

Posted on 17:45 by Unknown
With our new Reactions feature, you can get one-click feedback from your readers. Think of it as a mini-poll for each blog post, or a flexible version of star ratings because you customize what options are available. We hope this will help your blogs get feedback from people who read your posts but don’t have enough to say to for a full comment.


To enable Reactions, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts gadget and then check the “Reactions” checkbox. You can edit the Reactions buttons by clicking "Edit" or clicking the buttons themselves, as shown.

You can customize the location of the Reactions within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box. We’ve found that it looks best when it’s on its own line, but your mileage may vary.



You can customize the options and their label to match the theme and style of your blog.


Additional Notes
  • This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Reactions.
  • The buttons should blend seamlessly with most blog backgrounds. Button backgrounds are a mostly transparent grey which should, we hope, coordinate with everything. The text and button highlight colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
    • Foreground: textcolor, textColor, mainTextColor
    • Highlight: linkcolor, linkColor, mainLinkColor
  • If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the reactions. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Reactions code from a fresh template. Search for “reactions-buttons” to find the appropriate block of code.
  • A known issue: if you choose short words/phrases, it’s possible to enter enough options that the line of buttons will wrap (and not look very good). If this happens to you, you'll need to shorten your options or reduce their number.
What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!
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Posted in homepage, reactions | No comments
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