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2007 has been Blogger's most amazing year yet! As you'll remember, we began it just after we had taken the new version of Blogger out of beta. Here's a quick run-down of many of the fun things we did since then:
If you're not using any of these on your blog, click through to the various Buzz posts and Help articles that explain them, and check them out — they're really nifty. And many thanks for sticking with Blogger through the transition to the new version earlier this year — it's a powerful and scalable platform on which we'll be building lots of exciting new features in 2008!

Two fixes just went live, before we sign off for a brief holiday break:
  • Unregistered commenters can once again provide an auto-linked URL [Help Group Thread]
  • Images in the Header page element will no longer be cropped vertically [Help Group thread]
We apologize for having broken these features for you. Your blogs and Help Group posts showed us the true extent to which you used and cared about these features, so please let us know if they're still being problematic.

Thanks for your patience!

After just two short weeks of testing on Blogger in draft, OpenID commenting is now available for all Blogger blogs. This means that your friends and readers can leave authenticated comments on your blog using their blog URLs from OpenID-enabled services such as WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals, or with their AOL/AIM accounts.


We've chosen a few popular OpenID providers to highlight on the comments form, but OpenID is, well, "open"! You can use any OpenID service to post a comment by choosing "Any OpenID" and filling in your OpenID URL.

You'll see the OpenID icon (OpenID icon) next to the names of commenters who posted with their OpenID. This icon assures you that the person who posted the comment is the same person blogging at the URL their name links to. Say goodbye to comment spoofing!

Turning on OpenID commenting on your blog

If you've set your "Who Can Comment?" setting to "Anyone," OpenID will be enabled on your comments pages right now! To change your comments settings, go to your blog's Settings | Comments tab in Blogger, and select "Registered Users" or "Anyone" in the Who Can Comment setting:


Getting an OpenID URL for your site

Blogger provides helpful shortcuts to WordPress.com, LiveJournal, TypeKey, and AOL, but you can use any URL that you control as your OpenID URL by using delegation.

For example, say you have a LiveJournal account with the username "brad." This gives you an OpenID URL at http://www.livejournal.com/users/brad/. You could comment with this URL, but you'd rather have your comments link to your homepage at http://bradfitz.com/.

By copying two lines of HTML into the <head> tag of http://bradfitz.com/, you can turn it into an OpenID URL. Then, you can use http://bradfitz.com/ to sign your comments, while logging in to LiveJournal when you do so.

Delegation gives you complete control over what URL you use to represent yourself online, and complete control over what service you want to use to login with. Sam Ruby wrote a great article about OpenID delegation that we recommend if you're interested.

LiveJournal, AOL, WordPress.com, and TypeKey aren't the only OpenID providers out there. If you need an OpenID account, you can also get one from myOpenID, Verisign, or any other service that implements OpenID.

The "Other" URL field

Right now, the only way to add a URL to your name when commenting is to sign your comment with OpenID. We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from launching OpenID support on Blogger in draft.

Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. We regret this appearance, since we're strong supporters of OpenID and open web standards in general.

If you haven't set up OpenID, you can still link to your blog — or any webpage, for that matter — by using the standard <a> tag inside the comment form.

As you videobloggers already know, you can upload your videos directly to Blogger. But for the rest of the video watchers out there, did you know you can just as easily post YouTube videos to your blog?

All you need to do is set up your YouTube account to post videos to your blog using the "Share" button. You'll enter your Blogger information once, and from then on it's one-click sharing from any YouTube video page!



See our help article for full instructions.

Take a look at our latest tool for your blog: the Slideshow page element. This feature lets you add a slick little slideshow of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Photobucket, or any site that supports Media RSS.

The photos will show up in your blog’s sidebar, gently fading into one another. Your readers will be able to go forward and backward, pause, and click through to the photo’s web page.

You can also make a slideshow of public photos based on a tag or label.

Like all page elements, Slideshow requires that your blog is using Layouts templates. Still need to switch? Read our help article on the topic.

In case you missed it: Want to see everyone’s photos? Watch Blogger Play.

Sasha Cagen’s To-Do List blog (which you may recognize as a blog of note) has just been released as a book! Both blog and book are collections of, well, to-do lists, mailed or emailed in by people. Think PostSecret meets Getting Things Done.

Watch the trailer, read the blog, buy the book, and make sure that you have an awesome screen name.


The results are in from the Blogger Challenge on DonorsChoose.org. Over 100 blogs and their readers helped to raise $420,000 for classroom projects benefitting more than 75,000 students in low-income communities. For more details and a list of some of the top blogs involved, check out the Official Google Blog.

AdSense recently introduced a feature called video units, that lets you include relevant YouTube video on your blog, and make money from ads on it. Here’s what they have to say about it:
"We're excited about the launch of video units -- a new way to enrich your blog with quality, relevant video content in an embedded, customizable player. Simply embed a snippet of code and have relevant YouTube partner content streamed to your blog. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your blog's content. Companion and text overlay ads are relevant and non-intrusive. To further blend the YouTube player into your blog, you can also customize the color scheme and layout as well as choose from three different player sizes."
AdSense Help has some more information about video units. Once you’ve created the code for a video unit, you can easily add it to your blog’s template using an HTML/JavaScript page element.

Last night we pushed a small-but-crazy-useful new feature for all Blogger blogs: subscribing to comments via email. This makes it a lot easier to stay in the conversational loop after you’ve commented on a post somewhere. For example, you could follow along with these discussions from some recent Blogs of Note:
You'll notice the new checkbox at the bottom of the Comment page, in the identity box:
In order to receive follow-ups via email, you’ll need to post your comment using your Google Account. We only send comments to your verified Google Account so that someone else can’t use this feature to send you email you didn’t sign up for.

In honor of Blog Action Day, we wanted to highlight some of the many Blogger-powered blogs that are focused on the environment, climate change, and sustainability. Want to see more Blog Action Day participants from around the web? Find them on Blog Search.
  • Cleantech Blog - Commentary on technologies, news, and issues relating to next generation energy and the environment.
  • The Conscious Earth - Earth-centered news for the health of air, water, habitat and the fight against global warming.
  • Earth Meanders - Earth essays placing environmental sustainability within the context of other contemporary issues.
  • Environmental Action Blog - Current environmental issues and green energy news.
  • The Future is Green - Thoughts on the coming of a society that is in balance with nature.
  • The Green Skeptic - Devoted to challenging assumptions about how we live on the earth and protect our environment.
  • Haute*Nature - Ecologically based creative ideas, art & green products for your children, home and lifestyle, blending style with sustainability.
  • The Lazy Environmentalist - Sustainable living made easy.
  • Lights Out America - A grassroots community group organizing nationwide energy savings events.
  • The Nature Writers of Texas - The best nature writing from the newspaper, magazine, blog and book authors of the Lone Star State.
  • Rachel Carson Centennial Book Club - Considering the legacy of Rachel Carson's literary and scientific contributions with a different book each month.
  • Sustainablog - News, information and personal meanderings related to environmental and economic sustainability, green and sustainable business, and environmental politics.
  • These Come From Trees - An experiment in environmentalism, viral marketing, and user interface design with the goal of reducing consumer waste paper.

Have you been enjoying Blogger Play? We introduced it here last month and so far it’s been mesmerizing viewers across the Internet with the latest photos as they’re uploaded to Blogger blogs.

Today we’re letting you take Blogger Play with you to your iGoogle homepage with the Blogger Play Google Gadget:

Add to Google
Click the button to get Play on your homepage!

We also took the opportunity to add keyboard control to the big version of Blogger Play: spacebar plays and pauses, and the left and right arrow keys move backwards and forwards.

Congratulations to Frank Warren, whose 4th PostSecret book, A Lifetime of Secrets, comes out today and is climbing up the Amazon bestseller charts (it’s #50 as of this writing)!

Take a look at its trailer:

PostSecret is by far one of the most interesting blogs, a showcase of tiny, beautifully-presented personal stories. It has become a favorite Sunday read for many of us on the team. Read it!

Bloggers Unite - Blog Action Day October 15, a week from today, is Blog Action Day, and the theme this year is the environment. If you have a blog and want to join in, all you have to do is use that day to post something related to the environment, in whatever way, shape, or form you prefer. You can pick an environmental issue that has meaning for you and let us know why it's important. Organize a beach or neighborhood cleanup and tell us about it. If you're into fiction writing, give us a story with an environmental theme. Have a podcast, videoblog, or photoblog? Join the fun! The idea here is to have a mass effect on public awareness by sharing as many ideas in as many ways as possible.

If you're game for participating, go register your blog with the 7,000+ other blogs (with 5 million readers!) that are already signed up. Also, see the Blog Action Day blog for more on how bloggers can change the world.

From the Google Blog, a post you should all check out:
When it comes to philanthropy, everyone’s got something different to give – some people have money, others have time, and bloggers have devoted readers. The creative folks at DonorsChoose have a few ideas about how bloggers can help students and teachers.

In case you’re not familiar with DonorsChoose, it’s a site where teachers post needs they have for their classrooms, and donors fund those projects directly. If you’ve got a blog, a website, or even an email account, you can help by creating what’s called a challenge. Just pick some of your favorite projects and challenge your family, friends, and readers to fund them. If you’ve got a Blogger account, it’s easy to add your challenge to your blog in just a few clicks.

To support their recent expansion to schools all across the U.S., the DonorsChoose team is holding a little competition, keeping track of which bloggers and webmasters drive the most funding to schools.

We think this is a cool idea, so we want to help it succeed. We’re going to reward the winning bloggers with exactly what they gave to DonorsChoose, students, and teachers: traffic. The competition will remain open until the end of October - we'll then take a look to see who has helped raise the most money in each of the eight DonorsChoose challenge categories. We’ll post links to the winners’ blogs here, and we’ll also throw in a $500 gift certificate for each winner to spend on DonorsChoose.

So here’s our challenge to you: go create a challenge on DonorsChoose.

Today we’re pleased to launch Blogger Play, a neat little toy we’ve cooked up to show you photos and blog posts as you’ve never seen them before.

Image credit: kiwisweden

Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn’t stop watching.

Over the years we’ve kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs. The fame of the scroller spread within Google, until one day we were asked, “so, when are you launching this?”

“Um...,” we replied. But we knew a good idea when we heard one. We got our UI people to come up with buttons and fadey effects and we got our engineers to make the whole thing fast and robust. A bit of work later, and now we can share it with all of you:


Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.

A caveat: we use many techniques, including Google’s SafeSearch technology, to keep the images clean. Nevertheless, on rare occasions an image that you may find vulgar or obscene will slip through our algorithmic filters. Google does not pre-screen the images that appear in Blogger Play, nor is it responsible for their content. To report a terms of service violation, you may fill out this contact form.

Hey Firefox users! The folks at FoxyTunes just added Blogger support to their Firefox plugin, which you can use to do a number of things, such as:
  • Control your favorite music-playing app from your browser
  • See what you’re currently listening to
  • Append your current song to the bottom of new blog posts
Check it out!

You may have seen stories in the news recently about malware on Blogger, such has this one from the BBC or this one from Committee to Protect Bloggers. Blogger was not compromised. Instead, the blog posts are from bloggers whose machines were compromised by a Trojan horse. These bloggers had their mail2blogger email addresses in their computers' address books (a perfectly legitimate use case), so when the malicious software spammed every address in their address book with its content, a copy of that email was posted to their blog.

We are in the process of notifying impacted bloggers and recommending that they scan their computers and run current anti-virus software, available in the Google Pack. This is also good advice for all computer users, especially those who may have clicked the links in the emails sent by the virus. For more information about computer security, check out upenn.edu and us-cert.gov.

Just wanted to bring your attention to a small yet nifty (and long-requested!) feature we recently added to Blogger's AdSense integration: inline ads

You can now show AdSense ads inside your block of blog posts, up to 3 times on your main blog page. This should definitely improve monetization for those of you using AdSense on your blogs, as this places the ads inline with your blogs' actual content. The AdSense blog shows how it works, and here are a few example blogs using the feature:

Today we are releasing video uploading to Blogger! This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading.

When you go to the Blogger post editor, you'll see a new button () next to the image uploading one. Just select a video from your computer, wait a few minutes for the upload and processing to occur, and voila! Now when you visit your blog, you will see something like this (of course without Tomo, the Blogger Akita):


To learn more about video uploading and see an instructional video on how to create a video podcast, go here.

Today marks Blogger’s eighth birthday! A time for reflection, a time to catch our breath from yesterday morning, and a time to break out the baby picture.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us over the past four-fifths of a decade, and thanks especially to you for all the blogs.

In honor of our birthday, we have a small present in the form of an iGoogle gadget for Blogs of Note. Click the “Add to Google” button below to put the day’s Blog of Note on your iGoogle homepage.


Add to Google

Say you live in Albuquerque, count the Smashing Pumpkins among your favorite bands, and like sushi. Starting today, we’re making it easy for you to find other bloggers who share your interests.

Now you can go to any Blogger profile page (start with your own, or perhaps another popular blogger’s) and follow any of the links on the page to get a list of other bloggers with the same industry, occupation, location, interest, or favorite book, movie, or music.


The Browse Profile results are tuned to show you people who have recently updated their blogs at the top, so you can find blogs with fresh posts.


If you haven’t filled out your profile, do it now to help people find your blog. Here’s how.

Don’t want to be found? Just edit your profile and uncheck the “Share my profile” box, and your profile won’t show up when other people browse.

Still curious about Blogger profiles? Read our FAQ.

FeedBurner users - we just added a feature for you. Matt's post on the FeedBurner blog explains it more fully, but in short, you can now specify a URL to which Blogger will redirect your feed's traffic. This means you'll no longer have some subscribers getting your Blogger-hosted feed while others get your FeedBurner feed, and your subscriber count should (as a result) be more accurate.

To enable this functionality, visit your blog's Settings | Site Feed page, and enter your feed's address in the "Post Feed Redirect URL" field.

Enjoy!

Note: this feature isn't limited to FeedBurner alone - you can use any feed-mashing service (like Pipes) with it.

As of today, the Polls feature has graduated from Blogger in Draft, and is now an official Page Element on www.blogger.com! Polls lets you add a poll to your blog's sidebar, which your visitors can vote on and see results. This video shows how to create a poll:


For more information about the Polls feature, see these posts on the Draft blog.

Our friends at Twitter just released a nifty new web badge, which you can use to easily display your Twitter updates in your blog's sidebar:

http://twitter.com/badges/blogger

(if you're unfamiliar with Twitter, its FAQ states that, "Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives. Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away. Curious people can make friends. Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Developers can use the API to make Twitter tools of their own. Possibilities are endless!")

Blogger in draft has some new features, if you're keen to tinker with (and give us feedback on!) some in-development stuff. Notably:
  • Polls, which you can add to your blog sidebars
  • Enclosures, which turn your blog feeds into pod/video-casts
Pete even posted some fun screencasts to show how they work: Polling, Enclosures and videocasting. Let us know what you think!

You may have noticed a new dropdown menu in your Blogger Dashboard:


In it are 17 new languages, in addition to the 19 that were there previously - tell your friends around the world! Here's the list of new ones:

Today we released something for Blogger that we've long wanted to do - an experimental version of the site where the early adopters among you can try out new features before they're ready for full release. We're calling it Blogger in draft because the features are almost ready for publishing, but not quite.

The first feature available on Draft is Video Upload, accessible via a new button in the Post Editor. Check it out!

By coincidence, a pair of stellar blogging clients have seen major updates in the past several days. If you like using Blogger but have browser-o’-phobia, one of these might be right for you:

The Windows Live Writer team has released Beta 2 of their software, which adds labels support along with the proverbial host of other features. Developer and friend of Blogger Joe Cheng covers the highlights and lowlights on his blog, and you can grab the beta for Windows Vista and XP over at the download page.

In the Macintosh corner, Red Sweater Software’s MarsEdit has been updated to version 1.2, adding Blogger photo upload support via Picasa Web Albums. Developer Daniel Jalkut (also a friend of Blogger) describes the update on Red Sweater’s blog. You can download a 30 day trial (Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher) from the MarsEdit page.

For bonus additional Blogger goodness (for Mac users), grab the newly updated, newly working again Blogger Dashboard widget from Google’s widget page. F12 + typing = blog post.

Working on a Blogger client of your own? Make sure you’re hanging out in the Blogger Dev group to chat and keep in touch.

Attention Videobloggers!

A few of us from the Blogger team will be attending the first-ever Pixelodeon Fest next weekend, at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

If you'll be going, we'd love to chat with you! Here's a description of the festival from their site:
"Pixelodeon is an annual independent video festival recognizing innovation, inspiration, and community in global online video. This is our inaugural year! Over 300 videos, four keynote speakers, two dozen curators, and several hundred people interested in independent media will get together in one weekend to celebrate the diversity and talent of online video content. If you want to see what’s happening online and meet the people who are making it happen, this is the place to be."
Update: Here's a great current.tv spot about Pixelodeon.

Our friend Ryanne has been asking us for an easy way to add an image to her blog’s header for a few months now. When we added the feature a few weeks back, she was excited enough to create a screencast to teach everyone how to do it:


Also, a plug: Blogger is sponsoring Pixelodeon, a vlogging conference Ryanne is co-organizing, happening June 9th and 10th in Los Angeles, CA. A few of us from Blogger will be attending - go there!

You can help us out and make money just by using Blogger! From time to time at Blogger we run usability studies to make sure that we’re on the right track with all the new features we’re working on.

If playing with Blogger for an hour or so and making up to $100 sounds like something you’d like to do, please sign up here. Have more questions? Read the FAQ. You don’t even have to live near Mountain View, CA to participate.

Today we're adding autosaving of draft posts to the Blogger post editor. Now you don't have to feel so bad about browser crashes, random laptop restarts, or that hamster vs. gerbil war going on behind your desk that keeps knocking your power cord out of the socket, because Blogger is automatically saving as you type! It's doing it to me right now. Even if I...

*smash*

Whoops! I just pretended that my browser crashed for the purpose of illustrating that the above paragraph is still intact, thanks to autosave! So say "goodbye" to lost blog posts. You won't miss them.

As you work on a new or draft post in the Blogger post editor, the page will periodically send a copy of the text, title, labels, etc. to our servers. We do this about once a minute, unless you type a lot, in which case we'll save as soon as you stop typing, just to be on the safe side. You'll know it's happening because the "Save Now" button at the bottom of the page will turn into a gray "Saved" button.

We'll autosave new posts (they'll become drafts) as well as draft posts that you edit. We won't autosave posts that are currently published, since you don't want your readers to see your updates while you're working on them.

On top of this, we're revamping the post editor's keyboard shortcuts to make them a bit more sane. Now Ctrl-P publishes, Ctrl-S saves a draft, and Ctrl-D switches from published to draft. We moved Preview over to Ctrl-Shift-P.

Now that Blogger's on fresh, solid ground, our engineering team is cranking full-steam ahead on lots of exciting new features! But we've got a classic problem that comes with growth - there's too much to do, and too few people to do it all.

Therefore, we're looking to hire some UI experts (both visual and interaction designers, as well as software engineers) to join the Blogger Team here at Google, and help us plan and build Blogger's next generation features. If you're interested, send an email to jobs@blogger.com with your resumé, and which of the following job descriptions you're interested in:

Anyone interested in hacking on Blogger's API should check out the freshly-updated Blogger Data API Developer Guide. It has sections covering development in several of the available client libraries, including Java, .NET and Python. For questions and discussion related to API development, head over to the bloggerDev list.

Last fall, Jordan introduced us all to our first Blog*Stars: those members of our Blogger Help Group who deserve special recognition for their contributions and their dedication to helping their fellow bloggers. Our original four are all still going strong, and now we're also pleased to announce the newest members to join their ranks. Congratulations to Panther, Sr. Mina, Miskaop, and Bonnie Calhoun! Keep shining, Blog*Stars!

Today at Blogger HQ we accomplished one of our most significant milestones ever: we changed old Blogger’s monitoring from “page us when it goes down” to “page us if it comes back to life in a horrifying, zombie state.”

Most of you probably haven’t noticed, since you’ve been happily (we hope) using new Blogger for several weeks or months now. But we’re excited to be done with it, since now we can focus 100% on the new Blogger and all we want to add to it.

While old Blogger totters off to realize its dream of getting to level 70 in the Burning Crusade, let’s take some time to remember what it took to replace the old Blogger with the new.

14 August 2006: The new version of Blogger launches as a public beta
23 August 2006: Blogger’s 7th birthday
30 August 2006: Edit HTML added to beta’s Layouts
2 September 2006: Login box fiasco solved
5 September 2006: Beta Known Issues blog launched
21 September 2006: Mobile posting added
4 October 2006: Picasa support added
26 October 2006: Week of Old Blogger meltdowns
2 November 2006: Beta declared “feature complete” with FTP support
10 November 2006: All new accounts created on Blogger in beta
12 November 2006: New mobile accounts created on Blogger in beta
11 December 2006: Team blogs allowed to switch to Blogger in beta
19 December 2006: New Blogger taken out of beta
4 January 2007: BlogThis! added
24 January 2007: Percentage of users required to switch to new Blogger
15 February 2007: All users required to switch to new Blogger on login
21 February 2007: FTP publishing reliability improved
4 March 2007: Performance problems with especially busy blogs resolved
28 March 2007: Offline process to move blogs from old to new Blogger begins
16 April 2007: 1000th Blog of Note
24 April 2007: All blogs moved off old Blogger, save [this] one
26 April 2007: Blogger Buzz moves to new Blogger, turns off lights on its way out
27 April 2007: DNS change to point www.blogger.com to new Blogger
4 May 2007: Old Blogger physically dismantled

And that’s how it happened. Enjoy the Blogger! (Exciting times are ahead.)

Oh, and due propers to everyone who made this possible. You know who you are, probably.

Today's Notable Blog is our One Thousandth - hurrah! For the curious, this Buzz post delightfully tells of Blogs of Note's history; in Ev's words it's:
"a simple, ongoing, irregularly updated list of blogs [we]'ve happened to come across and found interesting for one reason or another. This reason need not be substantial. It could be [we] liked a particular post. It could be the blog seems to have good writing, or good design, or original content or concept, or [we] just like the name."
Since re-launching Blogs of Note over a year ago, we've done a pretty good job of publishing a new one each day; of course this is entirely thanks to you all for creating such great blogs - keep up the great work!

Lately they've ranged from cooking (breakfast, a single dad's kitchen) to travel/outdoors (Alaska, Dubai, Australia) to music to documentary to international awareness - and that's just in the past 10. For more, check out the 5+ year archive at blogsofnote.blogspot.com, and here's to the next thousand!

Our friends Anupama and Nitin have posted on the Google blog about the Hindi transliteration feature that they added to Blogger:
Enabling the transliteration option allows you to type out Hindi words using phonetically equivalent English script, and see the words getting transformed into the corresponding Devanagari script. The plus is that you now don't need to learn complicated mappings from English alphabet combinations to Hindi letters. That means you really don't need to worry about WeiRD UpPerCasEing to get the right Hindi spellings.
To get started, enable Hindi transliteration here (or by going to Settings > Basic). We have a help article explaining how it works, and a thread on the Blogger Help Group to talk about it.

Here at Blogger we believe that everyone all over the world should be able to express themselves online. When our attempt to translate into “love” (a supposedly universal language) failed, we decided to take the more effective route of translating our interface into rather more literal languages.

Today we've unveiled Blogger translated into: Nederlands, Türkçe, Dansk, Norsk, Svenska, suomi, Русский, and ภาษาไทย. This is in addition to the eleven language choices we already offer, bringing the total to 19!

To change the language in which you use Blogger, go to our Choose a Language page. To change your blog’s language, go to Settings > Formatting.

Thanks to our friends from the Ajax Search API team, we now have two more fun and useful widgets you can add to your new Blogger blog: Newsreel and Video Bar:


The Newsreel searches Google News for your chosen keywords and displays an ever-updating list of their search results. The Video Bar does the same for Google Video and YouTube searches, and even lets you play the videos without leaving your blog! Check out Pete's mobile blog for particularly erudite examples of the Newsreel and Video Bar in action.

To use the new widgets, click your blog's Layout link on your Dashboard, then click "Add a Page Element." You'll find the new widgets right at the top. As a bonus, the Newsreel will change from a list of summaries to a scrolling ticker depending on whether it's in the sidebar or the main column, so drag 'em around and see what you like.

Not using the Layouts feature of the new Blogger? We have a help article that explains how to switch your classic template to Layouts.

Ever wanted to see all the photos you've uploaded to your blog in one place? Head over to Picasa Web Albums and now you can! We've been working closely with the Picasa team on this project - all the photos you've uploaded since December will appear in an album there, and we're working on migrating your older photos as well. (It'll take a while though - there are a lot of them.)

Each of your blogs now has its own album in Picasa Web Albums, which is exciting because you now have a photo management interface for your blog's photos - for example you could order prints, use the fancy email this photo feature, or easily embed the album somewhere else on the web. Be careful when you delete photos though, because deletions will affect both your blog and its album. Lastly, Blogger photos are now part of Picasa Web Albums' 1GB of free quota, which can be upgraded.

Check out Picasa and Picasa Web Albums!

The South by Southwest (SXSW) festival/conference/hipsterstravaganza starts this weekend! If you’re going, or just happen to be around Austin, TX for kicks or livelihood, make sure that you party with us on Sunday.

Drinks are on Blogger (also dancing)
Sunday, 11 March 2007, 6–9PM

Club De Ville
900 Red River St.
Austin, TX
upcoming
map

This is an invitation only event! The only way you can get in is to find someone from Blogger beforehand and get an invitation - we'll be wearing Blogger gear. There are a ton of us hanging around the conference and we’ll be passing out the invitations wherever we go.

Update: Looking for ways to get around Austin? Google Transit just launched service for Austin today. Check it totally out, and use public transportation to join SXSW in being carbon neutral.

“This is Blogger. And we party with scarves on.”

Post by T.V. Raman, Google Research Scientist

From The Everything Can Be Done In Emacs Dept...

Blogger exposes a clean API based on Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) and Google Data APIs (GData). This Emacs module leverages this functionality to enable one to blog from within the comfort of a full-featured editing environment.

Where to get it

The Emacs Blogger client is part of g-client, a suite of Emacs clients for accessing Google Services. The current distribution can be downloaded from Google Code and the source code is available via Subversion.

Installation
  1. Unpack the tar archive and place the resulting g-client directory on your emacs load-path.
  2. Type make to compile the code.
  3. In your .emacs, add (load-library "g") to set it up.
Google Blogger gblogger

This client implements posting, editing and deleting of blog entries using the new Blogger API --- it replaces the now obsolete atom-blogger that implemented similar functionality using the old Blogger API. It uses value of customization option g-user-email by default; this can be overridden via option gblogger-user-email. See Blogger GData API for the underlying APIs used. For editing posts, I recommend installing nxml-mode.
  • Browse command gblogger-blog brings up the list of blogs owned by the currently authenticated user.
  • Posting command gblogger-new-entry takes a post URL and sets up a special buffer where you can compose your article. The post url is obtained from the feed of blogs above; use the post link for the blog to which you wish to post.
  • Browsing command gblogger-atom-display displays the atom feed for a specified blog as a browsable HTML page. In addition to reading your blog, this helps you find the edit url for individual posts.
  • Editing command gblogger-edit-entry takes the edit url of a previously posted entry. It retrieves the entry, and sets up a special composition buffer where you can edit the entry.
  • Submitting - the special composition buffer created by commands gblogger-new-entry and gblogger-edit-entry provide a special command gblogger-publish (bound to C-c C-c) that submits the entry to blogger.
  • Deleting Command gblogger-delete-entry deletes an entry specified by its edit url.
The emacspeak blog has further details.

Attention blog searchers: if you use Google Blog Search from within Blogger, you'll notice some slight changes to its look and feel - it was just updated today to be more consistent with the Google styling, and it tested much better in the usability lab.

It also means new functionality for the Blogger look 'n feel, notably the date-restrict options in the sidebar. For example, "earthquake san francisco" restricted to March 1st will tell you about the earthquake that just happened, and "snow south lake tahoe" restricted to Feb18-28 reveals some pretty excited people (myself included ;).

Check it out!


Do you have a great idea for a Blogger widget? The new version of Blogger has an API for adding a custom widget to a blog. By using a simple web form on your site, you can encourage bloggers to add your widget to their blogs.

Here are some sample custom widgets:

readerGoogle Reader
Display your shared items from feeds you read. (Read more)


lalaLaLa.com
Show the music albums you have available for trading.


feedburnerFeed Burner
Show statistics or summaries about your feed. (Read more)

The folks at Cordless/WMG recently launched three awesome Blogger-powered blogs for their bands Dangerous Muse, Throw the Fight and Die Mannequin. Aside from their fantastic designs, they've done a number of neat-o template integrations with other Google services like YouTube, Calendar, Picasa Web Albums and Reader.

A bit from Wikipedia:
"Dangerous Muse are an American electropop duo based in New York. The duo comprises vocalist Mike Furey and Keyboardist/Programmer Tom Napack, often depicted using a Keytar... The duo originally met in 2003 through a mutual friend during the production of The Who's Tommy at Fordham University in New York."

"Die Mannequin is an Alternative rock / sleaze rock trio from Toronto, Canada fronted by 20 year old guitar player and singer Care Failure. Rising from the ashes of Failure's first four-piece band "The Bloody Mannequins", Die Mannequin started in the spring of 2006 when Failure recorded her first EP, How to Kill, on which she sang and played bass and guitar because she didn't have a permanent band at that time."
... and melodic.net on Throw the Fight:
"Throw The Fight is an aggressively driven, five-piece rock band hailing from Minneapolis, MN. Always trying to define their identity in the "it´s already been done" world of music, the members of Throw The Fight are holding their heads high and are forging a name for themselves all across the country."


Check 'em out!

Dangerous Muse - http://dangerousmuse.blogspot.com/

Die Mannequin - http://diemannequin.blogspot.com/

Settings - Publishing The new version of Blogger now supports using a custom domain for serving your blog. If you already own a domain named, say, mysite.com and want your blog to be served at that address instead of at a blogspot.com address, we can host your blog on that domain for you — for free. Your old Blog*Spot address will forward to your new custom domain, so the switch will be seamless for your readers.

Of course, FTP publishing is still available if you'd like to do your own hosting, but using a custom domain gives you a ton of advantages:
  • Simpler to set up. You don’t have to muck around with FTP paths and file names.
  • Fast publishing. There’s no waiting for files to upload to a hosting provider.
  • Drag-and-drop template editing. You can use the new Blogger’s new template features.
  • Access control. If you'd like, only let people you choose read your blog.
Using Blogger's custom domains is a simple way to start serving your blog on your own domain without having to deal with the hassle of transferring the files to a separate web host.