September 15, 2009
Turn Your Blog into a Book with Blog2Print
Guest Post by Caroline Vanderlip, SharedBook CEO
To continue Blogger's 10th anniversary celebration, I’m delighted to announce that Blog2Print has now partnered with Blogger. Blog2Print lets you publish some or all of your posts and photos as a professionally-printed, full-color book. Since 2007, thousands of Blogger users have become Blog2Print fans, using our easy and quick service to save and share all their favorite writings with friends and family or to keep a hard-copy version of their work. You can make books by season, by year, by event or even by theme, and you can choose from soft cover or hard cover versions of your book.
Your book from Blog2Print.com can include selected comments from your posts, and you can also add your own additional photos and new comments as you edit your book to make a unique edition for posterity.
Blog2Print is easy to use – just enter your blog URL, select the date range for the posts you’d like to include, and choose a cover from among the nine choices. You can add an optional dedication, and then click to produce your book. A table of contents will be generated automatically, and in a few seconds you’ll see a preview of exactly what your finished book will look like.
Best of all, Blog2Print books start at only $14.95 for a soft cover book. The base price includes 20 pages, but you can add as many pages as you like – just 35 cents each.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
To continue Blogger's 10th anniversary celebration, I’m delighted to announce that Blog2Print has now partnered with Blogger. Blog2Print lets you publish some or all of your posts and photos as a professionally-printed, full-color book. Since 2007, thousands of Blogger users have become Blog2Print fans, using our easy and quick service to save and share all their favorite writings with friends and family or to keep a hard-copy version of their work. You can make books by season, by year, by event or even by theme, and you can choose from soft cover or hard cover versions of your book.Your book from Blog2Print.com can include selected comments from your posts, and you can also add your own additional photos and new comments as you edit your book to make a unique edition for posterity.
Blog2Print is easy to use – just enter your blog URL, select the date range for the posts you’d like to include, and choose a cover from among the nine choices. You can add an optional dedication, and then click to produce your book. A table of contents will be generated automatically, and in a few seconds you’ll see a preview of exactly what your finished book will look like.
Best of all, Blog2Print books start at only $14.95 for a soft cover book. The base price includes 20 pages, but you can add as many pages as you like – just 35 cents each.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
September 14, 2009
Widgetbox: Make a Widget From Your Blog
Guest Post by Will Price, CEO of Widgetbox
In honor of Blogger’s 10 birthday, all of us at Widgetbox are excited to announce a partnership with Blogger that allows you to quickly and easily turn your blog into a widget. Whether you want to add your blog’s headlines to your main website, let your fans showcase your content to their audience, or you want a widget that helps make your content more discoverable across the web, Widgetbox-powered widgets will help you get the most visibility for your content, while eliminating the need for any manual updating or management.
For example, the Blogger Buzz widget below was made in seconds and includes posts, images, and Blogger Buzz branding:
Key Benefits?
How Do You Build Your Widget?
Building a widget with Widgetbox is simple, easy, and fun. Simply:
Tens of thousands of Blogger users have already made a widget from their blog on Widgetbox. Take your blog feed, make it into a widget, and share it with everyone. It’s that easy!
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
In honor of Blogger’s 10 birthday, all of us at Widgetbox are excited to announce a partnership with Blogger that allows you to quickly and easily turn your blog into a widget. Whether you want to add your blog’s headlines to your main website, let your fans showcase your content to their audience, or you want a widget that helps make your content more discoverable across the web, Widgetbox-powered widgets will help you get the most visibility for your content, while eliminating the need for any manual updating or management.
For example, the Blogger Buzz widget below was made in seconds and includes posts, images, and Blogger Buzz branding:
Key Benefits?
- The easiest way to build a widget from your blog
- Colorful, interactive, and engaging
- Easy to add to Blogger and sites across the web
- As you update your blog, the widget automatically updates with the latest posts, headlines, and images
- Helps you reach new readers and drive traffic back to your blog
Building a widget with Widgetbox is simple, easy, and fun. Simply:
- Enter your blog feed
- Design your widget’s look and feel
- Publish the widget
- Add it to your site and watch it spread across the web
- Access statistics on unique views, widget installs, and other blogs and domains that have installed your widget
Tens of thousands of Blogger users have already made a widget from their blog on Widgetbox. Take your blog feed, make it into a widget, and share it with everyone. It’s that easy!
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
September 11, 2009
It's a date!
by Ross Peter Nelson, Software Engineer, Google Calendar
Do you have an event you'd like to invite your readers to? Thanks to Blogger Gadgets, this is now a piece of cake. Click the Customize link in the toolbar, and go to the Layout tab. There, you'll see the Add a Gadget link. The Event Gadget is currently one of the featured gadgets, or you can add it directly by clicking "add your own" and entering the URL http://www.google.com/ig/modules/calendar/socialevent/bloggerevent.xml . You'll then be taken to a configuration page that lets you enter information about your event. Once you click Save, it will be visible on your blog for everyone to see.
The gadget allows your readers to indicate whether they are going to attend the event, and lets them see which of their FriendConnect friends will be there too. In addition, anyone with a Google Calendar account can simply click a link to have that event added to their Google Calendar.
You can add multiple events to your blog as long as you give each one a different title or ID, and we'll keep track of who's attending which one.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
Do you have an event you'd like to invite your readers to? Thanks to Blogger Gadgets, this is now a piece of cake. Click the Customize link in the toolbar, and go to the Layout tab. There, you'll see the Add a Gadget link. The Event Gadget is currently one of the featured gadgets, or you can add it directly by clicking "add your own" and entering the URL http://www.google.com/ig/
The gadget allows your readers to indicate whether they are going to attend the event, and lets them see which of their FriendConnect friends will be there too. In addition, anyone with a Google Calendar account can simply click a link to have that event added to their Google Calendar.
You can add multiple events to your blog as long as you give each one a different title or ID, and we'll keep track of who's attending which one.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
September 09, 2009
You Might As Well Jump!
by Sean McCullough, Software Engineer, Blogger
It's time to announce another Blogger Birthday feature! Many users have been asking for an easy way to implement "Read more" links on their blog's index page. In fact, for years bloggers have been implementing "Read more" jump breaks themselves by manually editing their HTML --- a process that was complicated and error prone.
Today we are excited to announce our latest birthday present: Jump Breaks.
With Jump Breaks you can show just a snippet of your post on your blog's index page. Blogger will insert a "Read more" link to the full post page where your readers can keep reading.
There are a couple of ways to insert a "Read more" jump to your posts. If you use the new post editor (available on Blogger in Draft, or by enabling it via the Settings tab), you'll notice the "Insert jump break" icon in the editor's toolbar. Click this icon and the "jump break" will be inserted into your blog post at your cursor's position.
If you don't use the new post editor, you can still insert a jump break in Edit HTML mode by adding <!-- more --> where you want to position the jump break.
Want to change the "Read more" text to something more your style? No problem. You can edit the "Read more" text by clicking Layout and then Edit the Blog Posts widget.
One more note, the Jump Break feature does not change how your post appears in your feed. You can configure post feed options by going to Settings | Basic | Site Feed, and editing Allow Blog Feeds.
Update: Users that have customized their Blog Posts widget or otherwise have highly customized templates: You may need to edit your HTML to enable Jump Breaks. First, back up your template, then follow the instructions at the bottom of this help article.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
It's time to announce another Blogger Birthday feature! Many users have been asking for an easy way to implement "Read more" links on their blog's index page. In fact, for years bloggers have been implementing "Read more" jump breaks themselves by manually editing their HTML --- a process that was complicated and error prone.
Today we are excited to announce our latest birthday present: Jump Breaks.
With Jump Breaks you can show just a snippet of your post on your blog's index page. Blogger will insert a "Read more" link to the full post page where your readers can keep reading.
There are a couple of ways to insert a "Read more" jump to your posts. If you use the new post editor (available on Blogger in Draft, or by enabling it via the Settings tab), you'll notice the "Insert jump break" icon in the editor's toolbar. Click this icon and the "jump break" will be inserted into your blog post at your cursor's position.
If you don't use the new post editor, you can still insert a jump break in Edit HTML mode by adding <!-- more --> where you want to position the jump break.
Want to change the "Read more" text to something more your style? No problem. You can edit the "Read more" text by clicking Layout and then Edit the Blog Posts widget.
One more note, the Jump Break feature does not change how your post appears in your feed. You can configure post feed options by going to Settings | Basic | Site Feed, and editing Allow Blog Feeds.
Update: Users that have customized their Blog Posts widget or otherwise have highly customized templates: You may need to edit your HTML to enable Jump Breaks. First, back up your template, then follow the instructions at the bottom of this help article.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
September 02, 2009
Earn Charity Donations on Blogger with SocialVibe
Guest Post
by Joe Marchese, SocialVibe CEO
In honor of Blogger's 10th anniversary, we are excited to announce that you can now use your blogs to create positive, measurable social change. By adding the SocialVibe gadget to your blog, you'll be turning brand dollars into real charitable donations for the cause of your choice. The World Wildlife Foundation, Nature Conservancy, DonorsChoose, Invisible Children, and Charity:Water are just a few of the great charities you can support on Blogger.
Once you install the SocialVibe sidebar gadget on your blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the gadget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip). You can switch your cause and sponsor as often as you like, and receive regular updates from your charity about goal progress and impact. Thus far, SocialVibe has been able to raise over $500,000 for charities, and we know the Blogger community will be able to significantly increase this amount. In fact, we are setting a goal for the community to raise $50,000 before the end of the year (and remember, you don't raise money by taking money out of your pocket—or your audience's—but rather by getting your readers to engage with your SocialVibe gadget).
Adding the gadget is easy. Here's the low-down on how you can use your blog to make a big impact:
Step 1 - Add the Gadget
From your Blogger dashboard, click the Layout tab. Then, click the Add a Gadget link and click on "Featured", then select SocialVibe. (If you don't see it in the Featured gallery, follow this link, or click "Add your own". In the textbox, add the URL http://www.socialvibe.com/s/blogger/gadget.)
Step 2 - Configure Gadget
Here's the fun part. Choose the cause you want to support from the drop-down list. If you want to customize the size and title, you can do that here as well, and you'll see a preview of your gadget underneath. When you're satisfied, click Save.
Congratulations, your gadget has now been added to your blog! Your readers can help you earn for your cause by engaging with your gadget, and will even have the chance to leave you comments and add a SocialVibe gadget to their own blog.
The yellow overlay you see on your gadget is only viewable by you, the blog owner. Click on the link in the overlay to create a SocialVibe.com account and earn even more charity donations by adding it to other networks such as Facebook, MySpace or WordPress.
With SocialVibe, the Blogger community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world. Never before has making a positive social impact online been this easy.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
by Joe Marchese, SocialVibe CEO
In honor of Blogger's 10th anniversary, we are excited to announce that you can now use your blogs to create positive, measurable social change. By adding the SocialVibe gadget to your blog, you'll be turning brand dollars into real charitable donations for the cause of your choice. The World Wildlife Foundation, Nature Conservancy, DonorsChoose, Invisible Children, and Charity:Water are just a few of the great charities you can support on Blogger.
Once you install the SocialVibe sidebar gadget on your blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the gadget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip). You can switch your cause and sponsor as often as you like, and receive regular updates from your charity about goal progress and impact. Thus far, SocialVibe has been able to raise over $500,000 for charities, and we know the Blogger community will be able to significantly increase this amount. In fact, we are setting a goal for the community to raise $50,000 before the end of the year (and remember, you don't raise money by taking money out of your pocket—or your audience's—but rather by getting your readers to engage with your SocialVibe gadget).
Adding the gadget is easy. Here's the low-down on how you can use your blog to make a big impact:
Step 1 - Add the Gadget
From your Blogger dashboard, click the Layout tab. Then, click the Add a Gadget link and click on "Featured", then select SocialVibe. (If you don't see it in the Featured gallery, follow this link, or click "Add your own". In the textbox, add the URL http://www.socialvibe.com/s/blogger/gadget.)
Step 2 - Configure Gadget
Here's the fun part. Choose the cause you want to support from the drop-down list. If you want to customize the size and title, you can do that here as well, and you'll see a preview of your gadget underneath. When you're satisfied, click Save.
Congratulations, your gadget has now been added to your blog! Your readers can help you earn for your cause by engaging with your gadget, and will even have the chance to leave you comments and add a SocialVibe gadget to their own blog.
The yellow overlay you see on your gadget is only viewable by you, the blog owner. Click on the link in the overlay to create a SocialVibe.com account and earn even more charity donations by adding it to other networks such as Facebook, MySpace or WordPress.
With SocialVibe, the Blogger community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world. Never before has making a positive social impact online been this easy.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
There's an app for that!
Rich-text WYSIWYG editing, image uploads, labels, configurable settings, and auto-save are among the many features that are part of BlogPress Lite, as well as a handful of other optimizations for the iPhone experience. Landscape editing mode is supported and will feel very familiar for iPhone users, and blog posts are automatically saved when you have an incoming call—you won't have to ever worry about losing a post.
We're grateful to the team at InfoThinker for adding to the birthday "party." The app has been submitted to the App Store and should be available shortly. (We'll update this post when we see it.)
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
August 28, 2009
Share from Nav Bar
by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger (Mountain View, CA)
It's fitting that our newest birthday present was announced first on Twitter. Starting yesterday, the Blogger Navbar includes a new button: "Share."
When your readers are on your blog's home page, they can click "Share" to post the blog's URL to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. If they navigate directly to an individual blog post, clicking "Share" in the navbar also lets them share the post by email.
We've already seen some nice adoption of this new feature and hope this helps you build out your audience and share your story with the world. Here's a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you're using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you're getting from each source.
On the other hand, if you're interested in seeing which blogs people are sharing, head on over to Twitter search and you can watch as people share blogs and posts that they like. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter while you're there!
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
It's fitting that our newest birthday present was announced first on Twitter. Starting yesterday, the Blogger Navbar includes a new button: "Share."
When your readers are on your blog's home page, they can click "Share" to post the blog's URL to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. If they navigate directly to an individual blog post, clicking "Share" in the navbar also lets them share the post by email.
We've already seen some nice adoption of this new feature and hope this helps you build out your audience and share your story with the world. Here's a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you're using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you're getting from each source.
On the other hand, if you're interested in seeing which blogs people are sharing, head on over to Twitter search and you can watch as people share blogs and posts that they like. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter while you're there!
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
August 26, 2009
Let the Music Play
Earlier this year, a number of our users complained about their experience on the receiving end of a DMCA complaint. Much commentary at the time focused on claims that we were removing blog posts at the behest of music labels, that we were not notifying users, and that we weren't providing users with any recourse if they were linking to the music with permission. Though we noted at the time that we hadn't changed anything and were still following our documented policy, we realized that there was room for improvement. Over the next several months, we talked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ChillingEffects.org, and reached out to a number of users to find out what they'd like to see in our policy moving forward. We're happy to make those changes our latest birthday present for our users.
First, a quick review: the DMCA is a U.S. law that says that a copyright holder (a music label, for example) can notify services like Blogger if they see cases where their content is being used without permission. Once we're notified by the music label and we believe the claim to be valid, we are then obligated to remove the content—otherwise we could be found liable for its continued use. Up until today, when we received a DMCA complaint, we would send an e-mail to the owner of the blog, forward a copy of the complaint (usually a fax) to ChillingEffects.org (more about Chilling Effects here), and delete the post.
There were several problems: first, some of our bloggers hadn't updated their e-mail addresses in years (Blogger's been around a while!). Second, ChillingEffects.org needed to review the faxes we sent to ensure that they weren't inadvertently publishing personal info, sometimes causing lengthy delays in the publication of the complaint. This meant that the blogger couldn't see the substance of the complaint—often for months. Finally, the post was gone! Posts that contained dozens, even hundreds, of links were removed from the Internet because of one link, and often the blogger didn't know the link wasn't acceptable.
Starting today, we've changed how we handle these situations:
This was a cross-team collaboration between our legal, policy and engineering groups, and on behalf of everyone who helped make this change possible: happy birthday!
Rick Klau, Blogger Product Manager
Alice Wu, Google Legal Department
Steven Chen, Google Policy Team
Saurav Shah, Blogger Engineering Team
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
First, a quick review: the DMCA is a U.S. law that says that a copyright holder (a music label, for example) can notify services like Blogger if they see cases where their content is being used without permission. Once we're notified by the music label and we believe the claim to be valid, we are then obligated to remove the content—otherwise we could be found liable for its continued use. Up until today, when we received a DMCA complaint, we would send an e-mail to the owner of the blog, forward a copy of the complaint (usually a fax) to ChillingEffects.org (more about Chilling Effects here), and delete the post.
There were several problems: first, some of our bloggers hadn't updated their e-mail addresses in years (Blogger's been around a while!). Second, ChillingEffects.org needed to review the faxes we sent to ensure that they weren't inadvertently publishing personal info, sometimes causing lengthy delays in the publication of the complaint. This meant that the blogger couldn't see the substance of the complaint—often for months. Finally, the post was gone! Posts that contained dozens, even hundreds, of links were removed from the Internet because of one link, and often the blogger didn't know the link wasn't acceptable.
Starting today, we've changed how we handle these situations:
- DMCA Complaints are handled via a web form. This form makes data intake easier, and makes it possible for us to share information with ChillingEffects.org without passing along personally identifiable information. It also allows us to notify affected bloggers more efficiently, as we provide information on not only the blog post in question but also the actual link(s) at issue.
- Complaints are sent to ChillingEffects.org automatically. ChillingEffects.org will have a copy of the complaint soon after Blogger receives it, making it possible for the blogger to find the complaint by searching for their blog's URL at ChillingEffects.org.
- Blogger notifies affected users through their dashboard as well as by e-mail. While we hope all of our users keep their e-mail addresses current so we can notify them in case there's anything important (hint, hint), we also went further by putting a big status message at the top of their dashboard to let them know about the DMCA complaint.
- Blog posts are reset to draft status and are not deleted. Now that users have the info they need to know specifically what the complaint was about, they can edit their post (found in their blog's dashboard status message, as well as by searching for posts in "draft" status) to remove the offending content and republish the post.
This was a cross-team collaboration between our legal, policy and engineering groups, and on behalf of everyone who helped make this change possible: happy birthday!
Rick Klau, Blogger Product Manager
Alice Wu, Google Legal Department
Steven Chen, Google Policy Team
Saurav Shah, Blogger Engineering Team
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
August 25, 2009
Partly cloudy, chance of labels
by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer, Blogger (Krakow, Poland)
In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about your wish list for features in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget.
Label Cloud
Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a "cloud" instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly:
Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels:
Selected Labels
If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose "Selected labels." You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget:
We hope you like it!
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about your wish list for features in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget.
Label Cloud
Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a "cloud" instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly:
Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels:
Selected Labels
If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose "Selected labels." You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget:
We hope you like it!
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
August 20, 2009
Sending Blogger some Birthday Cheer
by Brian Shih, Google Reader Team
If you use Google Reader to keep track of all the interesting Blogger blogs you're following, you might have run across something you really wanted to share on your blog. With Reader's new Send To feature, we've made it easier than ever to do this. Just head over to Reader's settings page and enable Blogger from the list of services:
Now, when you want to send a post to Blogger, simply click the "Send to" button and choose Blogger. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, "shift-t" will do the same. We'll send you over to Blogger with everything you need to write about the post. And that's it! We hope this makes it easier for you to blog about things you read in Reader - if you have feedback, please head over to our help group, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
If you use Google Reader to keep track of all the interesting Blogger blogs you're following, you might have run across something you really wanted to share on your blog. With Reader's new Send To feature, we've made it easier than ever to do this. Just head over to Reader's settings page and enable Blogger from the list of services:
Now, when you want to send a post to Blogger, simply click the "Send to" button and choose Blogger. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, "shift-t" will do the same. We'll send you over to Blogger with everything you need to write about the post. And that's it! We hope this makes it easier for you to blog about things you read in Reader - if you have feedback, please head over to our help group, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.
This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
, eBay.com (just to name a few)--but cannot decipher all the hype from the true quality!?