Announcing the Blogger app for iOS

Today we’re excited to announce the new Blogger app for iOS. With the Blogger app, you can write a new blog post and publish it immediately or save it as a draft right from your iOS device. You can also open a blog post you've been working on from your computer and continue editing it while you're on-the-go. Your blog posts are automatically synced across devices, so you’ll always have access to the latest version.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and the Blogger app makes it easy to add photos either by choosing from the gallery or taking a new photo right within the app. You can also add labels and location to provide more details about the post.

Download the Blogger app today for iOS versions 3.2 and above in the App Store. Although the user interface is only available in English at this time, the app supports blog posts written in all languages. If you’re using an Android-powered device, you can download the Blogger app for Android from the Android Market.

Posted by Chang Kim, Product Manager

Blogger’s fresh new look

Posted by: Chang Kim, Product Manager

As you may have heard, things are starting to look a little different across many Google products—and today, Blogger is the next product to get a makeover.

It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time.

Throughout the design process, we conducted user interviews to help identify how to make Blogger even easier and more enjoyable to use. We also watched users try our new interface and made many refinements based on their feedback.

A streamlined blogging experience
Whether you’re on a dashboard or settings page of blogger.com, you can always create or edit posts with just one click at the top of the screen. Additionally, the post editor has been expanded and simplified to give you a larger canvas for drafting and previewing your work.

Monitor and grow your audience at a glance
In the new “Overview” section of your dashboard, you’ll be able to quickly get a pulse for how people are reacting to your blog with a graph of your most recent traffic numbers, comment activity and follower counts. For extra guidance and inspiration, you’ll also find a list of helpful links, a feed of Blogger updates and a showcase of other blogs you may find interesting.

Opt in now
Starting today, we’ll gradually let all bloggers choose to turn on the new UI, so your Blogger experience won’t be updated until you enable it. Over the next few days, keep an eye out for a pop-up announcement on your dashboard with instructions on how to get started, and check out this Blogger Help Center page to learn more about what’s changed.

If you have suggestions or feedback about the new look, click the gear icon in the top right of the navigation bar and select “Send Feedback.”

We’re working hard to fundamentally revamp and improve the Blogger experience from the ground up, and we hope you enjoy the first in a series of major updates that are on their way in the coming months.

Latest updates, August 1st

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

Hello Bloggers!

Over the last few days we’ve rolled out a handful of updates, all of which are available to everyone right now. Here’s the rundown:

Favicon graduates from Draft

As we announced on the Blogger in Draft blog earlier this month, we now offer an easy tool for creating custom favicons on your Blogger blog. We’re happy to announce today that this feature is now available to all Blogger users.

Since the initial release to Draft, we’ve added support for all image types (JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc) and will now automatically resize the image to the correct favicon specifications. You can add a custom favicon to your blog right now on the Design | Page Elements tab, via the new favicon element shown below:

Swipe navigation for Mobile views

Adding to the featureset of our new mobile templates, you can now navigate through your mobile view with swipe navigation. This new navigation option lets you swipe through individual blog posts in a way that should feel very familiar for mobile and tablet users.

If you are viewing this post from a mobile device, you can give this a try right now!


Support for +1 on Pages
A few weeks ago we announced the +1 button on Blogger, and now we’re happy to expand coverage to individual pages as well as blog posts. The +1 button will now appear on Pages as an option on the sharing widget just as it has appeared for individual blog posts.

That’s it for now, more to come soon! Happy Blogging.

You can do some amazing things with Blogger

Guest post by David Kutcher

Editor’s note: We invited David Kutcher, an innovative web developer from Northampton MA, to write a guest blog post to share how he uses Blogger to create robust, beautiful and easy to use websites for his clients.

Hi, my name is David Kutcher. I own Confluent Forms LLC, a graphic design and custom web-based software development firm in Northampton, MA. We specialize in creating gorgeous and engaging websites with custom content management systems. As curious as it made sound, we’ve found that Blogger can be a great platform for web development when a custom CMS isn’t needed. Blogger provides a ton of functionality and design freedom for our clients, and not just for blogs!

You’re probably thinking: “what? using blog software for a website?”. I know - it sounds a bit unconventional, but it’s true.


I think that most users do not realize the value and flexibility that Blogger offers, including free hosting, complete customization, personalized domain options, WYSIWYG editor and more. Because Blogger is a Google product, you can also easily integrate with other Google services such as: Google Analytics, Google Docs, AdSense, Picasa and more. All of this is available free of charge while providing a simple, easy authoring environment for the small business owner.

As a web development firm, Blogger provides us with a different value proposition. When we pitch a Blogger-based solution to a client we can provide services at a lower price point while still maintaining full creative freedom. I don’t need to set up a paid hosting account for my client, worry about security patches or upgrades, or be concerned about system uptime and availability. Finally, I can easily transfer ownership and management of the site to my client, or, continue to keep us both as co-administrators.

It can be hard to envision a platform’s potential from a list of features so here are a few examples of what we’ve achieved with Blogger.

• 360 Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark
• Pinch Gallery
• Renew Pilates Studio
• Impish
• Ode Boutique
• Elbow Room Coffee Company

I hope the examples above have opened your eyes to some of the possibilities of what you can do with your Blogger site, or maybe encourage you to give Blogger a try for your website solution. A longer, more in-depth version of this post is available on our blog. My company is lucky to have an exceptionally talented designer that isn’t afraid to push us, but even if you don’t have the ability to create an entirely new site template, perhaps this will encourage you to explore the underlying code of your site and to customize some of the small details to match your vision for your site.

Happy designing and coding!

David

New tools for handling copyright on Blogger

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

In keeping with Google’s public commitment to make copyright work better online, our team has been working on improving the copyright environment for bloggers and copyright owners alike. As access to the web grows, bringing new content and services online, it becomes even more important to ensure the rights of everyone involved are protected and understood. To that end, we’re happy today to announce the release of two significant improvements to Blogger’s copyright handling toolkit:

1.)  Streamlined submission tools for rightsholders. 

Working alongside industry representatives, we’ve built a better submission and handling system for our high-volume DMCA takedown submitters that simplifies the reporting process and reduces our average response time to less than 24 hours.

2.)  Streamlined counter-notice tools for users. 

Built right into the dashboard, Blogger now offers a simple way to counter-notify incoming DMCA takedown notices to blog authors who believe their content was improperly targeted for removal. This will initially be available for users receiving notices from our high-volume submitters, though we have plans to expand this to other notices down the road.

In addition, to ensure transparency around the entire system, we’ll continue to forward all DMCA notices (as well as counter-notices) to the Chilling Effects cease & desist clearinghouse where they’ll be available for public searching.

As a refresher, here is a recap of how our DMCA removals procedure works today, factoring in these two updates we’ve just announced:

1. A blogger (let’s call him Joe Blogger) decides to post a link on his blog to a downloadable copy of Album X.
2. The rightsholder believes the link leads to an unauthorized, infringing copy of Album X and submits a takedown notice for that specific post.
3. The DMCA takedown notice is processed by the Blogger Team, and if determined to be a valid complaint, the post in question is reverted to draft, Joe Blogger is notified, and a copy of the complaint is sent to Chilling Effects.
4. At this point, Joe Blogger has the right to file a counter-notice and request the post be restored if he believes the takedown was improper. He may also edit the post to remove the allegedly infringing content himself.
5. If Joe Blogger files a counter-notice, notification will be sent to the rightsholder as well as to Chilling Effects, and after ten business days the post will be restored if the rightsholder decides not to pursue further action.
6. Rightsholders may pursue further legal action if they deem the counter-notice sent by the user to be invalid or erroneous.

These updates are the most recent among the copyright-related improvements our team has implemented over the last two years, all intended to strike a responsible balance between the needs of copyright owners and bloggers.

Creator vs. Curator

Post by Lisa Ding, Community Manager

Of the blogs that I read every day, more than half are blogs that link me to news articles, websites, or other blog posts on the web. It used to be that bloggers were expected to write original content. While original content remains highly valued by many readers, it's no longer taboo to simply share things that you find elsewhere on the Internet. Followers will read your blog to see the great content that you surface. Essentially, every blog can be a small gallery of a blogger’s interests and taste.

One of my go-to blogs for Internet trends is Brandflakes for Breakfast, which states its mission is to “read the internet, so you don’t have to.” The posts are short and quippy, and the contributors work for a digital creative agency, so I trust the content that they’re surfacing will be relevant to the Internet, marketing, and branding -- some topics that interest me.

While I’m a fervent reader of blogs, I’ve struggled to post original content on a regular basis. Fortunately, I’ve discovered a couple of sharing tools on Blogger that will help me post more often. As long as I keep finding interesting things on the web, I’ll be able to use these two shortcuts to help me generate quick blog posts:

1. Blog This! tool for Chrome: If you're using Chrome as your browser, simply install this extension and you'll be ready to write a blog post with a prepopulated link.
2. If you want to share a post from another Blogger blog, select the ‘B’ sharing button at the end of the post. A link and blurb of the post will pre-populate, so simply type an intro, and voila! you have a new post. (Note: If you don't see the sharing buttons on your own blog, you can enable them by going into the Design tab and editing the Blog Post page element.)

A question for our bloggers: do you consider yourself primarily a creator or a curator?

Why do you blog?

Posted by Inci Atrek, User Education Specialist

Hi Bloggers,

At the beginning, life can seem a bit lonely in the blogosphere, so kudos to you for taking that first step and starting a blog. Whether your purpose has evolved over the years or you’ve stuck around for the same reasons that got you started, we truly enjoyed reading your responses to our #bloggerasks tweet on why you blog.

@CprincessUK broke it down in list form, music blogger @LinerNotes crafted a mission statement, and @fortnow blogged about blogging for Blogger’s 10th anniversary. Others of you kept your raison d’être under 140 characters. Here are a few of them, short and sweet:

“I started blogging because I loved my wedding and talking about weddings and my fiancé didn't - I needed a community” (@CMatlick)

“Main reason: creative writing outlet. Aux reasons: counteract stereotypes/preconceived ideas abt Pakistan, Pakistanis, & Islam :)” (@desigurrl)

“I started blogging after a near death experience to create a legacy for my three young children” (@FrillyHills)

“Started blogging to write about food and Flavor of Italy's culinary tourism business” (@FlavorofItaly)

Whether it’s your love of magic, to share tips on shaving, to chronicle life with the kids, or for reasons you still haven’t figured out, we want to know -- why do you blog?

Cheers,

Inci

Update on Browser Support

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

Our team has been thinking a lot recently about browser support, and wanted to make you aware of our new plan moving forward. For web applications like Blogger to continue to evolve at a rapid pace, our engineering team needs to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, Dynamic Views, which we previewed in March, and Web Fonts both require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just aren’t able to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

For this reason, starting next month Blogger.com will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Blogger as well as many other Google Apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites.

So if it’s been a while since your last update, we encourage you to take advantage of the improved performance and security these modern browsers have to offer by installing the latest version of your preferred browser. There are many to choose from:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Safari

As the world moves more to the web, these new browsers are more than just a modern convenience, they are a necessity for what the future holds.

Fashion blogs on Blogger

Posted by Lisa Ding, Community Manager

I wouldn’t consider myself a “fashionista,” but I do follow a good fashion blog or two.

Aside from The Sartorialist, which is one of the most frequently-viewed blogs on Blogger, I’m an avid follower of The Man Repeller. The blog is filled with photos of beautiful clothes, and I love the sassy attitude of Miss Man Repeller herself. This lady really seems to embrace the phrase “dressing for other girls.” Men, don’t worry about it.

There are quite a few popular fashion blogs on Blogger, but one thing that I’ve noticed many have in common is the use of a simple template with a customized header image. The simple template allows you to highlight the most important part of a fashion blog -- the images. And instead of have just text for a title header, you can draw readers in with a splashy colorful image that leaves a strong impression.

What are some of your favorite fashion blogs on Blogger? I’ll take some of your suggestions via comments and feature them in a future post. 

Note: Please only submit fashion blogs -- other types will be featured later. I'll be crediting the nominator, so please leave your Twitter name or blog URL. Looking forward to your suggestions!

Meet Bruce, Blogger PM

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

Hello Bloggers!

I’m relatively new to the Blogger team, but have been a Product Manager on Google’s “Geo” team since 2006, specifically for the Google 3D Warehouse. Product Managers work closely with software engineers, designers, and marketing to establish product requirements and define product features.

What initially attracted me to Blogger was the impact that it has on people’s lives. Blogs, by their very nature, enable people to express themselves. Some blogs attract our readership from an intellectual perspective, some for their entertainment value, and still others stir our emotions. That’s powerful stuff.

On the Blogger team I hear frequent use of the term “bloggers.” While it’s natural to generalize sometimes, what’s fascinating about Blogger isn’t the entity of a blog, but instead the interests and motivations of the real people who are behind each and every one. As human beings, we enjoy listening to and sharing stories. This is what Blogger facilitates at a fundamental level.

What I hope to gain from Lisa’s focus on Community Management is greater insight into how you are using Blogger. The deeper the understanding we have for how you use the product, the more informed we are when deciding where to take Blogger in the future.

Happy blogging!

Bruce

http://poldermanblp.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/PoldermanBLP

The best blogging advice you’ve ever received

Posted by: Inci Atrek, User Education Specialist

Hi Bloggers,

We've set out to learn more about blogging from the people who know it best -- our users. I’ve really enjoyed your responses to our #bloggerasks tweets over the past two weeks, and spent a good amount of time reading through the blogs and posts that you’ve sent us.

Something that always astounds me about blogging is how the core experience of sharing stories pulls together an incredibly diverse group of people. The emphasis you all put on connecting with each other really speaks to the power of community among bloggers.

Here are some of my favorite responses to the question, What’s the best blogging advice you’ve ever received?

• “Write to build community; link to others and participate in the conversation” (@LisaSpangenberg)
• “To blog consistently, respond to comments, and to read and comment on other people's blogs (especially those who read mine).” (@kelblogg)
• “To not only be active within your own blog but on others' as well - leave comments, but don't spam!” (@OnceBittenBlog)

Although it’s important to keep your readers in mind, most of you tweeted about staying true to yourself, and writing about what you love. @Mistylovesvamps said it best: “don't be a slave to stats & followers.”

The balance between writing for yourself and becoming part of a community can be difficult at first - even a little scary - but it’s worth it. And if you’re still on the fence, consider the best blogging advice @Shakestweetz received: “Hey, you should start a blog.”

Missed our #bloggerasks? Keep an eye out for future tweets, and for my posts on your responses. Have even more blogging advice? Let us know - leave a comment!

Cheers,
Inci

Getting to know the Blogger Community

Posted by Lisa Ding, Community Manager

Hi Bloggers!

For more than a decade now, the Blogger team has watched our community of users grow dramatically and have had the pleasure of seeing some truly amazing blogs along the way. Here on Buzz, in addition to keeping you updated on new features, we’re going to focus on engaging with our user community and connecting more readers to exceptional blogs.

On Buzz, you can be expecting a variety of new posts, such as:

1. A revolving showcase of funny, interesting, beautifully designed, creative, and just plain awesome blogs. 
2. Guest posts from other successful Blogger users. 
3. Re-shares of interesting posts from your blogs. 
4. Personal posts from members of the Blogger Team, so you can get to know us better. 

In the coming weeks, I’ll be asking you to submit quality blogs that you enjoy reading. Each week, I’ll post a sample of the best blogs I’ve found within a certain theme (food, design, sports, etc) or, that incorporate a recently-released feature. I encourage you all to nominate blogs that don’t necessarily have an established following, since we’d like to promote new bloggers who could benefit from more interactions with other bloggers and more readers. Also, we’ll be sure to credit the nominators, so you’ll be getting a readership boost, too!

Please say hello via comments, and tell the Blogger community a little about yourself. Also, look out for the first request for blog nominations coming soon.

Best,
Lisa

Blog This!

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

One of the things I often hear is how challenging it can be to generate ideas for topics to write about. This may be especially true for popular blogs when you feel as though your followers are eagerly awaiting your next post. Sitting down and staring at your computer with the hope of feeling inspired can result in disappointment. 

On my blog for example, I have a mix of posts that were authored be me, and articles that I've discovered elsewhere that I think may be of interest to others. Like many of you, there are times when I have things that I’m eager to write about, and other times when I just want to share something.

If this sounds familiar, you may find the “Blog This!” Chrome Extension of interest. It enables you post to your blog from any web page with just one click. The Extension is available on the Chrome Web Store under the “Blogging” category.

When you install the extension, a button will appear on your browser toolbar. Simply click the button to open Blogger in a new application window.

The new post is pre-populated with a link to the web page you're on, as well as any text you've highlighted on that page. Edit the post to your liking and post it instantly to your blog.

Happy blogging!

Announcing Blogger Mobile Templates

Posted by Jiho Han, Software Engineer

A few months ago we introduced mobile templates to Blogger in Draft. Today, we’re excited to announce that not only will these templates be available to everyone, we’ll be supporting all 27 Template Designer templates. We invite you to make your blog smartphone-friendly by going to the Dashboard > Settings > Email & Mobile tab and enabling the mobile template option.

Blogger mobile templates are mobile-optimized versions of our Template Designer templates. If you are using one of these templates, when you enable the mobile template option your blog will begin rendering using the mobile version of the same variant. Even if you are not using a Template Designer template, or using a heavily-customized version of one, you can still enable this feature to have your blog start rendering in a generic default mobile template that we have created.

Some of our feature highlights:

• Preview: Get a glimpse of how your blog will be displayed by clicking on the Mobile Preview button. You can also see it on your smartphone by scanning the QR-code.



• Automatic redirection: Viewers will see the mobile version of your blog when accessing from smartphones*.


• Template support: We are now supporting all 27 templates. Some gadgets are also supported**.


• Mobile ads: Mobile AdSense ads will be displayed at the top of the post pages and at the bottom of the index page if the blog has an AdSense gadget or in-line blog ads.



• Comments and videos: Viewers on smartphone devices will be able to make comments and watch videos.

We hope you enjoy the mobile templates. As always, we would love to hear from you so please let us know what you think through our feedback form, and stay tuned for future improvements.

*WebKit-based mobile browsers are supported for this launch.
**Supported gadgets/elements in this launch: Header, Blog, Profile, AdSense, Attribution.

Add the +1 Button to Your Blog

Posted by Marcos Almeida, Software Engineer

“+1” is often used as a digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” It’s also a way for friends, contacts, and the rest of the world to find great things on Google search. Google launched the +1 button back in March as a way to help share web content and make search more personal and relevant. For more information about the +1 button, you can watch this short video:



Since Google made this feature available, web publishers and bloggers have been asking us how they can add the +1 button to their sites, including Blogger blogs. Today, we’re excited to let you know that you can add the +1 button to Blogger blogs with just a few clicks.

To add the +1 button to your blog, you’ll need to enable Share buttons on Blogger. To do this, go to Design > Page Elements on your Blogger dashboard, find the Blog posts area, click on Edit, and select the “Show Share Buttons” option. If you are already using Share buttons, the +1 button will automatically show up as a new share option.

By adding the +1 button to your blog, you’re providing an easy way for your visitors to recommend your posts to their friends right from your blog. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you blog about biking. One of your readers, Tom, finds your recent post about mountain biking interesting, and clicks on the +1 button. Now, when Tom’s friends and contacts search for biking or mountain bikes and your post appears in Google search results, they might see an annotation showing that Tom +1’d your post, helping your content stand out.

[Example of how a blog post +1’d by visitors appears on the Google search results page]

We hope +1’s will help your blog stand out better in search results, which could increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to your blog. Now, that’s indeed a big +1, isn’t it?

Add a virtual tip jar to your blog

Posted by Peng Ying, Developer Programs Engineer

Update 6/10: We've updated our gadget's Terms of Service and you will need to agree to these new terms before you can add or continue to use the gadget.

We know that most of you blog for the sake of sharing your thoughts and opinions, however a little side income is like an unexpected gift. Today we’re releasing a new gadget that allows your readers to directly contribute to your blog. The gadget can be added to any part of your page, but we’ve formatted it to fit best in the sidebar.

Setup is only five simple steps and should only take a few minutes of your time; just follow the steps below:

1. Sign up for a Google Checkout Merchant account at checkout.google.com/sell
2. Be sure to enable the HTML API by going to the Settings tab, clicking the integration link and unchecking the “My company will only post digitally signed carts” checkbox. Also, copy the Merchant Id for use in step 5.
3. Back in Blogger, on the Design | Page Elements tab click “add a gadget” where you wish to place the Support gadget.
4. Add the "Support My Blog" gadget from the gadget gallery.
5. Customize your support button settings. The Checkout Merchant Id is the one you copied down in step two. Save and you’re done!

Your supporters can now contribute to your blog. Clicking on the support button will direct your supporters to Checkout to complete the transaction. For an example of the support button in action, please visit the following blog:

http://bloggercheckout.blogspot.com/

Blogger is back

Update (5/31 7:45PM PST): We've published an incident report on Blogger Status. 

Update (5/15 10:55PM PST): Blogger should be back to normal for the vast majority of people affected by this issue -- if posts are still missing, please check your drafts (you may need to republish). We are in the process of restoring comments made during the affected period from 7:37am PDT on 5/11 to 1:30pm PDT on 5/12. If you still have other issues, please contact us via the temporary form we’ve set up for this particular issue. Thanks again for bearing with us, we’re deeply sorry for the inconvenience we caused. We’ll share an incident report later this week.

Update (5/14 5:37 PM PST): We're making progress restoring comments, some blogs with a lot of content are taking a little more time. Thanks for bearing with us.

Update (5/13 7:46PM PST): Nearly all posts since Wednesday are restored, now bringing back comments from last couple days. We expect the comments to be back this weekend or sooner.

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored.  Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation.  We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish.  We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring.

Again, we are very sorry for the impact to our authors and readers.  We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we’ll do our best to prevent this from happening again.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger

Updates and Fixes, May 5th

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

April showers bring May flowers, and updates to Blogger! Here's the run down of the latest changes available to everyone right now:

Add location info to your posts with geotagging

Geotagging has been available for a while on Blogger in Draft, but is now available to all users with today’s release. To add location information to your blog posts, simply click the Add Location button in the bottom right of the new post editor. This will bring up a new window that displays the familiar Google Maps interface and you can search, drag, zoom, and drop markers for the location of your choice.

Once you’ve settled on the location you want to add to the blog post, just click Save and the information will automatically be added to the footer section of your published post (if you don't see it, you'll probably have to enable the Location option in the Blog Post widget which is normally defaulted to 'on'.)

We’ve made a few small updates and bug fixes since the original Draft release, most notably the ability to remove location information after publishing and the addition of a placemarker for pinpointing location info.

Refreshed interface for image and video upload

Clicking the “photo” or “video” upload buttons will now display a sleeker, updated picker. We’ve also made it draggable so you can look back at the post editor if you need to.

A pair of Known Issues are now fixed

• Users posting comments from non-Google accounts should no longer see the intermittent bX errors that occurred last week.
• The intermittent errors which were preventing the browsing of archives via Newer / Older navigation links has been fixed.

An important note about legacy accounts

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

(This message only applies to a tiny fraction of users who haven’t logged in to Blogger since 2007. If you’ve logged in to Blogger at least one time since 2007, you won’t be affected and can disregard this message.)

There was a time early on in Blogger’s life where we had our own, custom account system for handling login authentication. Starting in 2006 all new Blogger accounts were created using the official Google accounts system, and then in 2007 we started the process of moving all of our legacy users over to the Google accounts system. Now, four years later, we’re finally at the home stretch of the transition. For a number of technical and operational reasons, we’ve decided to finally end our support for migrating legacy accounts and blogs after September 30th, 2011. So if you have a Blogger account and haven’t logged in since 2007, you will lose access to the account and associated content permanently unless you update to the Google Account system before September 30th.

Updating to the new account system is easy and should take just a few minutes. We really do value all of the content that has been created on Blogger and we hope that as many people as possible will reclaim their blogs. If you’ve been avoiding this task for a while, we encourage you to head over to the Legacy migration page and update your account.

We’ll be sending a similar notice later this week via email to all of the email addresses associated with the legacy accounts we have in our database. In a few weeks we’ll also make another announcement here on Buzz, with more specific updates on the transition.

If you have any other questions about this process, please let us know by posting your issue in the Login section of our Help Forum.


Update, 7/31: We've pushed back the cut-off date for supporting legacy migration from June 25th to September 30th.

YouTube Us!

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

If it’s been a while since you’ve checked out the Blogger YouTube channel, you may want to head over and have a look around as we’ve given the whole site a facelift. Beyond our shiny new theme and graphics, we’ve added thirteen hot-off-the-press videos that cover a wide range of feature walk-throughs, handy tips, and other fun stuff that the team has come up with. And this is just the beginning!

We had so much fun putting these videos together that you can be sure to see a lot more uploads in the future, as we want this channel to be an ever-evolving source of Blogger information.

The Blogger team would love to hear your feedback on the new YouTube page, and we’ve created a form where you can pass along your ideas for further videos and other ways we can improve our channel. Of course, you can always send us a quick tweet or drop us a line in the Feedback section of our Help Forum as well.

Either way, we hope you enjoy our revamped channel and we look forward to expanding it over time.

Dynamic Views, the Chrome Extension

Posted by Mike Lawther, Chrome Engineer

Last week we announced five exciting new ways to view your blog content, which take advantage of the latest web technologies to provide a richer experience for your readers. You can already see these views in action by appending /view to the end of any Blogger URL, but today we’re happy to announce another way to experience these views via the Blogger Dynamic Views Chrome extension.

Once installed, the extension will automatically detect when you are viewing a Blogger blog, and then display a Blogger icon (the orange ‘B’!) in your address bar which lets you select and view the blog in one of the five new dynamic views. It’s that simple.

Of course, you can always disable the extension whenever you want from the Extensions section of the Tools menu. Try it out today, and please feel free to leave a rating or review on the extension page.

Google to Acquire Blogger

Update: This was an April Fool's post. The acquisition was in 2003 :-)
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Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Blogger CEO
[Cross-post from google.blogspot.com]

This morning we’re beyond thrilled to announce that Blogger has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google, the Internet search company. This is exciting news not only for all of us on the Blogger team, but for our users, our partners, and most importantly -- the blogosphere itself.

Understandably, you probably have lots of questions about what this means for Blogger and Blogger users. Below, we've put together some initial answers to many of the biggest questions. More info will be available as we figure it out. Thanks for your support as we transfer into this next exciting phase.  


Q: Why did Blogger sell to Google?
A: Well, on the surface, it may look obvious: A company of Google's size could give Blogger the resources we needed to do things better, faster, bigger. It's been a long eleven+ years since we started the company, and not all of them were very fun. We had been making serious progress over the last year or so, but bootstrapping (growing without funding) is always a slow process, and we were a long way from where we wanted to be. We wanted to offer a better service. And with Google, it wasn't just their size, of course. They had clearly done an incredible job building their technology and business, and we'd been big fans.

However, that doesn't mean it was an easy decision. We'd seen many small companies doing interesting things die (or at least become uninteresting) after getting acquired. It was only after becoming convinced that: a) There were sensible, cool, powerful things we could do on the technology/product side with Google that we couldn't do otherwise; and b) It was a good company, run by people we liked, who wanted the same things we did (i.e., they wouldn't screw up Blogger or make our lives miserable).

We became convinced both of these were the case rather quickly after thinking about the product side and talking to lots of Googlers.   Also, Google liked our logo. And we liked their food.

Q: Will Blogger go away? 
A: Nope. Blogger is going to maintain its branding and services. While we may integrate with Google in certain areas there will always be a Blogger.

Q: What does the acquisition mean to Blogger users? 
A: Greater reliability, new innovative products and a whole lot more that we aren't ready to share quite yet (truth is, we're still figuring a lot of it out). Right now, we're mostly bolstering up our hardware -- making things faster and more reliable -- and getting settled. Next, we're going to be working on some killer ideas we've been wanting to implement for years. It'll be fun.

Q: Will there be any changes to my account? 
A: Not right now but if anything does change we will notify you ahead of time, as we've done in the past.

Q: Will there be any changes to the Blogger products? 
A: We will be making some changes in our product line. We've been working on a new version of Blogger for some time now that will be coming out soon. We'll tell you more as soon as we know.

Q: What are your plans for the future? 
A: We are building a nuclear powered... Wait, you almost had us. We aren't telling, yet! But we will have more in a few weeks.

Q: Does this mean my blog will rank higher in Google search results? 
A: Nope. It does mean your blog might be stored physically closer to Google but that's about it. The people at Google have done a great job over the years making sure their search results are honest and objective and there's no reason they would change that policy for Blogger or anyone else.

Q: What will happen to all the nice kids that work on Blogger? 
A: We’ll still be working on Blogger and making it better.

Q: Are you still as handsome as ever? 
A:

Fresh new perspectives for your blog

Today we’re previewing five new dynamic templates in Blogger that you’ll soon be able to customize and use for your blog. These new views use the latest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, to deliver a host of benefits to you and your readers:

• Infinite scrolling: read more posts without having to reload or click to a second page
• New layouts: different views suited to different types of blogs
• Speed: download images as you view them, not all at once in advance
• Interactivity: there are now more ways to experience and engage with blog content

Click on any of these links to take the new dynamic views for a spin on a few of our favorite blogs: Flipcard, Mosaic, Sidebar, Snapshot and Timeslide.

Flipcard

Snapshot

Mosaic

To try these views on your own blog, simply add “/view” to the end of the blog URL—for example, http://buzz.blogspot.com/view. These new views are available on all public Blogger blogs with feeds fully enabled—to learn more, including how to disable these views for your blog if you wish, please see our help center article.

We’re previewing these templates early on so we can incorporate your feedback for a wider launch soon. At that time you’ll be able to customize these templates and select one for your blog. Please let us know what you think!

Antin Harasymiv, Software Engineer, Blogger

Spare two cents?

Published by Brett Wiltshire

We had a fantastic week in Austin during SXSW, and it was a pleasure getting to talk to so many of you who dropped by our booth and party. We always learn a lot when we get to speak with our users and it makes a big difference when we're thinking about the next exciting things to work on.

In that spirit, we thought we'd give those of you whom we weren't able to talk in person a chance to pass along your input on Blogger and the way you publish content online. So for those with a few thoughts to share and an extra few minutes lying around, please check out our quick survey.

Thanks, and we really do appreciate it!

Engage your audience with Follow by Email

Posted by Ben Eitzen, Software Engineer

Fresh content is the fuel that drives the blogosphere; it keeps readers coming back to your blog. Our team is always thinking of new ways to connect users with the freshest content across Blogger, and today we’re happy to offer a new, powerful way to do just that with Follow by Email.

The Follow by Email gadget provides blog authors a simple way for their readers to subscribe to the latest hot-off-the-press updates, which are delivered directly to the reader’s inbox. When new blog content is published, all subscribed readers will receive a daily email notification of the new published posts, which includes a copy of the new content as well as links back to the actual posts.

To enable Follow by Email, click the Add a Gadget link from the Design | Page Elements tab, and then select the Follow by Email gadget which should be at the top of the list. Once you add the gadget, readers visiting your blog can then just enter their email address and click Submit.

Taking advantage of Feedburner technology, Follow by Email will also track your subscription information, such as the number of subscribers and daily views. To view these stats, log into Feedburner.com, and select the appropriate blog feed from your list.