We released a few bug fixes tonight for regressions introduced last week:

• Issue 795: Blog metafeed did not contain rel="self" links in entries. This had the even more unfortunate side effect of breaking some of our sample code, which was using these links to derive blog IDs.
• Issue 798: Query parameters were being repeated in the rel="next" and rel="prev" links in feeds, leading to invalid duplicate parameters.
• Issue 803: Unable to fetch blog documents.

We apologize for these regressions, and hope that they’ve been fixed satisfactorily.

With the most recent release of Blogger we’ve added Media RSS <media:thumbnail> elements to both Atom and RSS feeds.

The <media:thumbnail> element links to a 72x72 pixel version of the first image in the post. Only images uploaded through Blogger to PicasaWeb are available as thumbnails.

We hope that you’ll be able to find fun uses for this new element. We’ve added thumbnail support to Blogger’s Blog List page element as a new option: Blog Lists can now display the most recent thumbnail from Blogger and other Media RSS–enabled feeds.

We’ve just launched three additions / fixes to Blogger’s site feeds:

• <thr:in-reply-to> elements from Atom Threading Extensions (RFC 4685). These elements point from comment feed entries to the post feed entry that they’re commenting on. They’re especially useful for associating comments from the per-blog comment feed with the relevant posts.
• Profile URLs in <person> entries. We’re now adding <uri> elements to <person> elements that point to the person’s Blogger profile or homepage. This matches the behavior on Blogger’s HTML comment pages. We’re also adding these elements to post <entry>s, but only if the author of the post lists the blog on his profile.
• RSS 2.0 feeds now validate. We’ve added dummy noreply@blogger.com email addresses to <person> entries so that they validate in RSS 2.0, which requires an email address.

How are these working out for you? Let us know in the Blogger API Google Group.