Reactions

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

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



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

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

Additional Notes

• This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Reactions.


• The buttons should blend seamlessly with most blog backgrounds. Button backgrounds are a mostly transparent grey which should, we hope, coordinate with everything. The text and button highlight colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
  • Foreground: textcolor, textColor, mainTextColor
    
    
    
  
  
  • Highlight: linkcolor, linkColor, mainLinkColor
    
    
  
  


• If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the reactions. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Reactions code from a fresh template. Search for “reactions-buttons” to find the appropriate block of code.


• A known issue: if you choose short words/phrases, it’s possible to enter enough options that the line of buttons will wrap (and not look very good). If this happens to you, you'll need to shorten your options or reduce their number.
  
  
  

What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!

New toolbar, AJAX saving, and other fixes for the post editor

Today we’ve released a few enhancements to the new post editor, fixed some bugs, created a new one or two, and left a handful of things to fix later.

New Stuff

• AJAX save. We’re still not saving posts automatically, but now the “Save Now” button will keep the post editor open, and Ctrl-S works as a shortcut for saving. (Internet Explorer users: use Ctrl-Shift-S to save.)
• New toolbar. This toolbar looks better, loads more quickly, and has undo and redo buttons. By popular demand, the full justification button has returned. We’ve also added a strike through button and improved the color palettes.
  
  
• Vertical resizing. You can now change the height of the post editor by dragging the resize handle in the lower right (near the labels field). The size is saved in a per-user, per-blog preference.

Fixed Bugs

• <div>s in Edit HTML are now better-preserved in Compose mode. This should fix most post summary hacks. If your hack uses <span> tags, please switch to using <div>s.
• Lists created in Compose mode can now have new items added to them after switching to Edit HTML and back.
• Line breaking is no longer lost when editing a post in the old editor that was first written in the new editor.
• Nested block-level elements no longer create odd blank lines.
• Non-breaking spaces now consistently appear as &nbsp; in Edit HTML mode.

New Bugs (that we know about)

• The publish and save buttons wrap oddly on Mac browsers.

Major Remaining Bugs (that we know about)

• The Font Size menu has 4 sizes instead of 5, and “normal” looks small.
• Paragraph tags are lost when switching from Edit HTML to Compose.
• The Blockquote button still behaves oddly, especially in Internet Explorer.
• The URL an image links to cannot be changed without using Edit HTML mode.
• Images inserted with this editor do not pick up border styles from the blog template.
• Inserting a new link with the link dialog loses your place in the post. 

Find anything else? See: How to report HTML bugs with the new post editor



Things Left To Add

• Toolbar in Edit HTML mode
• Autosave
• Spellcheck
• Video upload
• FTP image upload
• Bi-directional text input and Indic transliteration 
• and a handful of smaller things too numerous to include here

New Post Editor

Today we’re releasing the first iteration of a completely new version of the Blogger post editor. This editor is more stable, compatible, predictable, and will help us bring more functionality to posts on Blogger over the coming months and years.



Out of the gate you’ll notice two areas where the new editor improves significantly over Blogger’s current editor: images and raw HTML.



One important quick note before we get into those, however: Autosave is currently disabled in the new post editor. We’ll turn it on in an upcoming release, but for now it’s off. You’ll want to periodically remember to save your drafts when using this editor.



On to the fun stuff!



Improved Image Handling

When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience. The thumbnails will be available until you close the post editor.



When you add an image from the dialog into your post it will be placed at the insertion point instead of at the top of the post.



If you don’t like where an image is in your post, you can drag it around to another spot. If you drag it towards the left side of the editor it will float to the left, likewise for the right, and if you leave it in the center it will be centered. You can drag the image between paragraphs and other block elements. Unlike in the current editor, dragging in the new editor preserves the link to the full-size version of the image.

You can easily resize or remove an image with the image size “bubble.” Click on the image (Firefox 3 users may need to double-click) to bring up the bubble, and resize the image instantly. You can resize any image, including ones added by URL, but if you resize an image that was uploaded through the post editor we resample the image on our servers to keep the download size small.



It might be easier to see this in action, so we made a short video to show off some dragging and resizing:

Improved Raw HTML

If you use Edit HTML, especially to add tables and other advanced HTML to your posts, you should find that the new editor has a number of enhancements to make the experience less frustrating, or, dare we say it, even pleasant.



By default, the current post editor replaces any newlines in your post with <br> tags. This can cause problems when you want to use newlines to make table or list HTML clearer, since the inserted <br>s will mangle the formatting significantly. The new post editor does not introduce <br>s within tables, lists, scripts, styles, preformatted blocks, or objects.

Since they won’t destroy the formatting, the new post editor adds clarity newlines to the HTML that’s generated by Compose mode. For example, if you create a list in Compose mode and then look at it in Edit HTML, you’ll see that there are newlines before each of the <li> tags.



For posts made with the new editor, the blog-level “Convert line breaks” setting (from Settings > Formatting) is ignored. Instead, newline behavior is controlled by an Edit HTML setting under “Post Options,” which affects how newlines and <br> tags are displayed in the Edit HTML editor. This means that, unlike “Convert line breaks,” you can change newline behavior when it would be useful for a given post without affecting the display of all the other posts on your blog.

We’ve also added a Compose mode setting to let you choose what happens when HTML tags are typed in to the Compose editor. The default, “Interpret typed HTML,” matches the current post editor’s behavior: typing “<b>bold</b>” into the editor would look like this in your post: bold. If you change the setting to “Show HTML literally” instead, you’ll get: <b>bold</b>.



The Edit HTML and Compose settings, along with the choice of whether to show Edit HTML or Compose by default, are saved per-user, per-blog and are updated when you save a post. The Edit HTML setting defaults to the value of the blog’s “Convert line breaks” the first time you open the new editor.



Other New Features

You’ll find other new functionality here and there in the new editor. Here are a few more highlights:

• Easy link editing in Compose mode. Just click a link and you’ll have the option of changing its URL or removing the link.
• Full Safari 3 support on both Windows and Macintosh. The old editor is pretty quirky on these browsers, but the new editor works as you’d expect.
• New Preview dialog that shows your post in a width and font size approximating what you’d see on a blog.
• Placeholder image for <object> tags (such as those from video embeds) so that you can see and drag them around Compose mode.

Currently Missing Features

Besides the aforementioned autosave, there are a handful of other features from the current post editor that are on our to-do list for the new editor. If you rely on any of these, you may not want to use the new editor for everything just yet.

• Spellcheck
• Video upload
• Hindi transliteration
• Bi-directional text controls
• Toolbar for Edit HTML mode
• FTP file upload
• Enclosures

Be patient: these will all come to the new editor over the upcoming weeks. Look for announcements on this blog.





Known Issues

We’ll be adding to these in the comments, probably, but here are a few little problems you might run into right now:

• The “Blockquote” button is unreliable in Internet Explorer 6.
• Lists and other block elements may get an additional blank line above them, which can be removed after re-editing the post.
• You cannot add more items to a list if you toggle from Compose to Edit HTML and back, or re-edit the post. As a workaround, add new <li> tags in Edit HTML mode.
• Bold and italic keyboard shortcuts do not work in Safari, and the publish and save keyboard shortcuts are not implemented in any browser.
• The site-specific modification that Opera added to enable the old rich text editor does not work with the new editor. We’re investigating adding official support for the new editor under Opera 9.5.
• All images uploaded through the new editor will go to Picasa Web Albums, even for FTP blogs. Images will not get uploaded to your blog’s FTP server.
• Image upload will not work for accounts that have not accepted the image upload Terms of Service. Upload an image through the old post editor to get the opportunity to view and accept the ToS.
• Internet Explorer 5.5 is no longer supported.

We hope that the above issues and missing features will not prevent you from at least giving the new post editor a try.



This editor will, when it’s ready, replace the current post editors across all of Blogger. Therefore, we really appreciate your feedback and especially reports of bugs and other strange behavior that you find. We’d like to address them all now so that things will go smoothly when we turn the new editor on for everybody.

Import and Export

Today’s release brings another long-desired feature to Blogger: Import and Export of blogs. Now you can export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one.

To export your blog, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to the Settings > Basic page. You’ll see the Blog Tools links at the top of the page for importing and exporting. (We also moved blog deletion up here from the bottom of the page. Don’t worry about accidentally clicking it, though; your blog wouldn’t be deleted until you confirmed on the next page.)

Once you click “Export blog” and press the “Export” button on the next page, your browser will prompt you to save the XML file for your blog. Keep it somewhere safe as a backup, or import it into a different blog. You can import one blog into another from the Blog Tools links, or when creating a new blog. Look for the “Advanced Options” at the bottom of the page.

When you import a blog, all of the posts will get saved in an “imported” state. From there you can publish just a few, or all of them at once. Here are some ideas for what you can do with importing and exporting:

• Merge two or more blogs into one. Take the exported posts and comments from one blog and import them into another one.
• Move individual posts from blog to blog. After importing, select just a set of posts to publish and publish them with one click.
• Back up your blog to your own storage. You can keep your words safe and under your control in case anything happens to your blog, or us, or if you want to remove them from the Internet.
• Move your blog somewhere else. Our export format is standard Atom XML. We hope to see other blogging providers extend their Atom support to include import and export. And, if you decide to come back to Blogger, importing your export file will get you back up and running in seconds.

Caveats

• The export format currently only covers blog posts and comments to those posts, not blog settings or templates. To back up a Classic template, copy and paste the template code from the editor. To back up a Layouts template, use the Backup / Restore template option to download a copy of your template.
• Before importing a blog for the first time, we recommend that you create a new, throwaway blog to import into so you get a sense for how the process works. Once you’re comfortable, import into your public blog.
• At the moment there is a 1MB size limit on the blog you can import. This is a bug that we are correcting the issue.
  

Have you imported or exported your blog? Let us know about how it went in the comments.

Embedded Comment Form

One of the most common complaints about Blogger’s comment form is that it’s on a separate page from the post, styled in a way that doesn’t match the blog. Our new embedded comment form addresses that by putting the comment form where your readers expect it: at the bottom of the post.



To turn on the embedded comment form, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to Settings > Comments for your blog. You’ll see that the “Show comments in a popup window?” setting has been replaced with the new “Comment Form Placement” setting. Just click “Embedded below post,” save your settings, and go check out a post to see your new comment form.

Additional Features

• The comment form works with Google Accounts, OpenID authentication, name / URL, and anonymous identities. As with the current comment form, we’ve set up shortcuts for a handful of common OpenID providers.
• Once you log in with a Google Account for one blog, you won’t have to log in to comment on other blogs during your browser session. Nevertheless, to protect your privacy, we use an <iframe> to keep your logged-in identity inaccessible to the blog itself.
• If you have a “Comment Form Message” set up, we put it on the post page above the comment form.
• If you require word verification for commenting on your blog, we’ll show the word verification form in a small dialog after you click “Post Comment.”
• Update, 6/27: The embedded comment form works with Classic templates. The <$BlogItemCreate$> tag will add the right HTML to your page.
  
  

Caveats

• If you’ve edited your template for the blog widget, you won’t automatically pick up the new code for the comment form. You’ll need to either reset the template by deleting the contents of the <b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'> element (backup your template first!) or copy the code from an unmodified blog. Update, 6/27: Amanda from Blogger Buster has written a howto post for updating a modified blog widget template. 
• The font color of the comment form is currently hard-coded to black. If your template has a dark background, this may make the “Comment As:” label hard to read.
• The embedded comment form currently does not support subscribing to follow-up comments via email, nor does it have a preview button.

How’s it working for you? Anything else you’d like to see? Does the comment form look particularly good or bad in your template?



Let us know in the comments, now with convenient embedded comment form technology.

Webmaster Tools for Blogger

Ever wonder why your blog shows up where it does in the Google search rankings? With our new Webmaster Tools integration that information is just a click or two away.



Webmaster Tools is a Google service that provides you with detailed information about your website’s visibility to Google’s search engine. You can see how often Google’s web crawlers visit your site, find out who links to your site, what searches are used to find your site, and even control how your page appears in the Google web results.



We’ve added a new link from the Blogger in Draft dashboard to take you directly to Webmaster Tools. If you follow it, we’ll add all your blogs to Webmaster Tools and verify them for you automatically. From there, you can poke around and learn about how Google search sees your blog.





You can learn more about Webmaster Tools at Google’s Webmaster Help Center.



As always, your comments and feedback are extremely important to us and we hope you’ll give this feature a test drive.

Star Ratings

With our new Star Ratings feature, your readers can easily rate your posts — or the things you post about — from one star to five stars with a single click, right from the post footer.



Think of Star Ratings as a mini-poll for each of your posts. If you blog about fashion, food, crafts, quotes, or art we think this will be particularly useful to you.



To enable Star Ratings, log it to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts page element and then check the “Show Star Ratings” checkbox.

You can customize the location of the stars within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box.



Additional Notes

• This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Star Ratings.
• The star ratings widget should blend seamlessly with most solid-colored blog backgrounds (one exception is Rounders, where the edges of the widget will be visible via a color change). The text and background colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
  
  
  • Foreground: textcolor, textColor
  • Backrgound: mainBgColor, bgcolor
• If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the Star Ratings. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Star Ratings code from a fresh template.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!

Posting Gadget for iGoogle

Today we’re launching a draft version of the Blogger Posting Gadget for iGoogle. With this gadget, you can write, save, and publish posts to any of your Blogger blogs directly from iGoogle.

Interested? Try it now:

Make sure you’re signed in with the same Google account you use on Blogger in order to start posting.

Currently, the gadget supports the following:

• Editing the HTML of title, body and labels
• A drop-down menu to select from multiple blogs (if you have them)
• The ability to publish a post immediately, or save it back to Blogger as a draft post
  

Tip: If you start writing a post in HTML and decide that you want image uploading or other rich text features, just click “Save Draft.” The gadget will save the post, then give you a link to directly edit the post in Blogger.

Some compatibility notes:

• The Blogger posting gadget will only work in iGoogle, not in other gadget containers, because it requires authenticating with your google.com cookie. We hope to remove this restriction in the future.
• Since this gadget uses the JavaScript Google Data API for Blogger, it does not work in Apple’s Safari browser. We hope to fix this in the future as well.
• We’re also hearing reports that the gadget is not working correctly in Internet Explorer. We’re looking into this. Now works in Internet Explorer; you may need to remove and re-add the gadget to pick up the fix.
  

While there’s still a bit we’d like to do with the gadget, we want to announce it first on Blogger in Draft to get your feedback. Some of the improvements we’re considering are:

• Availability in all of Blogger’s supported languages
• Auto-completion for labels
• Autosaving of posts
  
• Rich text editing

What’s on your list? Let us know in the comments.

Update, 3:15PM: Added compatibility note about Internet Explorer.
Update, 6/10: Fixed to work in Internet Explorer.

Scheduled Posts

We’ve often heard that sometimes you’d like to write a post now and have it automatically published at some time in the future. We listened, and are pleased to say that this feature is ready for you to try out on Blogger in draft.

Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.

Your scheduled posts appear in your Edit Posts list alongside your drafts and published posts. To un-schedule a post, simply save it as a draft any time before it gets published.

Remember: Like all features described on this blog, Scheduled Posts only work when you’ve logged in to http://draft.blogger.com/.

Leave your feedback in the comments!

Additional Notes:

• We know that some bloggers currently use future post dates in order to keep one post at the top of their blog for a while. Though we recommend that you use a Text page element for this, you can still get this old behavior with just one additional step. First, publish your post with the current date and time. This will publish it to your blog. Then, once it’s published, edit the post to change the date to the future and publish it again. We don’t re-schedule posts that are already published, so the post will stay on your blog but sort to the very top.
  
• As with published posts, the post editor does not autosave scheduled posts if you go back and edit them. You wouldn’t want the post to publish while you’re in the middle of editing it! You can save the scheduled post as a draft to remove the scheduling and this will turn autosave back on.
  
• In some testing we’ve found that schedule posting is not working for some FTP blogs. If you run across this, please let us know in the comments so we can try to track it down.
  

Feature: Blog List

Bloggers often feature a list of their favorite blogs, called a “blogroll,” in the sidebar of their own blog. Our latest page element, Blog List, helps you do just that, but we’ve mixed it in with Google Reader to make it even more powerful and useful.

At its most basic, Blog List displays a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon. If you link to a blog with an Atom or RSS feed, however, the Blog List can show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post.

You can set the number of blogs to show in the list and whether they should be sorted by update time or alphabetically by blog title.

You add blogs to your Blog List by entering blog or feed URLs directly, or by importing subscriptions from Google Reader. When you add by URL, Blogger will attempt to detect an Atom or RSS feed for it in order to show post and update information. If none is found, the blog will still be added to the Blog List, just as a simple link.

Please try this out! Add a Blog List (Or two! Or more!) to your blog and let us know what you think in the comments. We value your feedback, and will try to incorporate as much as we can before the Blog List goes big-time on www.blogger.com.

Remember: Like all features mentioned on this blog, you must log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ to add a Blog List.

Additional Notes

• The Blog List writes all links out in HTML so that, unlike JavaScript-based blogrolls, you pass PageRank goodness on to the blogs you link to.
• The icon next to a feed is taken from the favicon.ico file in the blog’s home directory. We currently do not support the “shortcut icon” link tag.
• Adding and removing blogs may not invalidate our cached version of your blog. If you’re having trouble seeing your changes, republish a post or make a small settings change to your blog. Update, 2/29: This has been fixed.
  
• Some blogs don’t link to their Atom and RSS feeds in a way that we can detect. In these cases, add the feed URL to the Blog List for best results.
  
• Only the blog admin who added the Blog List may edit and configure it. Why is that? You’ll find out later...

Blogger as OpenID provider

As we hinted before, we’ve been working on making Blogger an OpenID provider. With our latest Blogger in Draft release, we’ve done just that. You can now use your blog’s URL as an OpenID URL on any website that accepts OpenID 1.1 authentication.

To enable OpenID for your blogs, just edit your profile on draft.blogger.com and enable the checkbox which says Enable OpenID for Blogs and you are all set!

After checking this box, you can use the URL of any of the blogs you are an admin of as an OpenID identity. When you use it to log in to another site, you will be taken back to Blogger where you can confirm that Blogger can tell the site that you own the domain.

You can find more information about OpenID and how it works at OpenID.net.

We hope you’ll try out using your blog as your OpenID identity around the web. Let us know how it goes in the comments! If you’re looking for things to do, take a look at MyOpenID’s OpenID Site Directory for OpenID-enabled sites.

Since this feature is still in draft, there are a few caveats:

1. We currently do not support OpenID for blogs that aren’t hosted on Blog*Spot or a custom domain, such as FTP blogs. However, the OpenID web site has a help page that explains how to workaround this limitation by delegating your FTP blog to a Blogger-hosted blog.
   
2. If you say “Yes, Always” to trust an OpenID site forever, you cannot now delete that trust. We will add this feature soon.

Update, 1/29: We have a quick HOWTO post for delegating to Blogger as your OpenID provider.








One of the cool things with our recent OpenID release is that you can use your own website, blog, or URL as your OpenID and still use Blogger as your OpenID provider. In the OpenID world, this is called “delegation,” and all it means is that you can use your own non-Blog*Spot URL as your OpenID identity, but still log in to OpenID sites with the Google Account you use on Blogger.

For example, if you have a blog at http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com/ but own the website http://www.myurl.com/, you can easily OpenID-enable http://www.myurl.com/. Just add this HTML to the <head> section of http://www.myurl.com/:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com" />

(Obviously, change “http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com” to your own blog’s URL.)

You’re all set. You can now use http://www.myurl.com/ as your OpenID identity on any site that accepts OpenID authentication, and you will be directed to Blogger to sign in.

Gadgets for your Blog

e’ve added some fun new functionality to Blogger in Draft: Google Gadgets for your blog. This feature lets you add pretty much any Google Gadget to your blog’s sidebar.

The Gadget directory is the same one used on iGoogle, which means there are thousands of Gadgets available for you to try. (Note: since most Google Gadgets were designed for iGoogle, they won’t all make sense for display on a blog.)

The Gadget directory is available directly in Blogger Layouts, in the Template | Page Elements | Add a Page Element popup:

This is an early version of our integration with Google Gadgets, so there will likely be some rough edges. Let us know what you think in this post’s comments!

New feature: Search Box

We just added a new feature to Blogger in Draft, the Search Box page element:


It uses Google's Custom Search Engine to dynamically search over your blog's content, as well as anything you've linked to in your blog posts, and even your sidebar-based link lists and blogrolls. In other words, it's really nifty - you can find it in your blog's Template | Page Elements tab, in the "Add a Page Element" popup.

Many thanks to the CSE and Ajax Search API teams for their work on this feature. Comments are enabled for this post, so let us know how it works for you!

Polls and enclosures added to Blogger in draft

Today we’re saving two more features to Blogger in draft: Polls and enclosure links.

The polls page element lets you add a poll to your blog’s sidebar. You choose the question and the answers, and let your readers vote. Learn more about polls.

Enclosure links let you turn your blog into a podcast. If you’ve uploaded your audio or video to the web, you can link to it as an enclosure so that your readers can subscribe and download it using iTunes or another podcatcher. We’ve also gone ahead and added enclosure information for all videos uploaded directly in Blogger, making video podcasting crazy easy! Learn more about enclosure links.

Still in draft is video uploading. We’ve got one or two more things for it before we’re ready to publish it…

How’s Blogger in draft treating you? The comment form is open!

Polls Page Element

The Polls page element is one of the new features we’ve added to Blogger in draft today. With this new page element, you can add a poll to your blog’s sidebar that your readers can vote in. Add as many answer choices as you like, and even select a date that you’d like the poll to close on.

Here’s a quick video of putting the polls widget into action:

We’d greatly appreciate your feedback on this feature and the other features on Blogger in draft. Leave your thoughts in the comments!

All new features on Blogger in draft are works in progress. We’ve got some ideas on how to improve this widget — for example, we’re working on making its style integrate better with the rest of your sidebar — but we want to hear your opinions as well.

Technical notes:

• You’ll need to be using one of Blogger’s new Layouts templates to add a poll. Still using a Classic template? Learn how to upgrade. (Caveat: it make take a bit of work if you’ve customized your template a lot.)
  
• Polls are unscientific.
  

Enclosures and Video Podcasting

The other feature launched to Blogger in draft today is support for enclosure links. If you haven’t heard of “enclosures” before, they’re the bits of info in Atom and RSS feeds that make podcasting possible. With the new enclosure links UI, you can turn your blog into a podcast quite easily.

To turn on enclosure links, just go to Settings > Formatting and set the “Show Link fields” option to “Yes.” This will add the enclosure link fields to your post editor. From there, just paste in the URLs of your recorded media, and your blog will instantly become a podcast.

Here’s a quick video showing how to get the enclosure links to show up:

That’s all very well and good, but we’ve gone a step further by hooking enclosure support in to Blogger in draft’s flagship feature, video upload. Starting today, we’re automatically adding enclosure information for Blogger video uploads, so your blog with video has instantly become a video podcast. Your readers can watch your videos on your blog with the Flash player, or they can subscribe to your videos with their favorite podcatcher.

Videos are provided for download in MP4 format, so they’ll play great on an iPod (or iPhone, but we haven’t tested that quite… yet…), as well as tons of other places.

Watch how we can turn our favorite video upload example video into a video podcast in this video:

We’re not 100% versed in podcasting ourselves (those guys left), so this is an area where we’re really listening to you for advice. Is there more metadata you’d like us to collect and provide in the feed? How’s the interface? Slick or merely functional? Podcasting pros: any tips for people just starting out? Where do you host your audio or video?

Speak your mind in the comments!

(Of course, since we’ve been uploading these demo videos with enclosure support, that means that this blog is now a video podcast. Perhaps you’d like to subscribe in iTunes?)

Some technical notes:

• Blogger supports adding multiple enclosures to a post, but for maximum compatibility with popular podcatchers, you may only want to include one enclosure per post.
• By default, Blogger feeds are in Atom format. If certain podcatchers require RSS 2.0 format, have them subscribe to http://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml.
  
• We auto-detect the MIME Type for common podcasting file extensions. You probably want to leave this alone unless you’re really sure what you’re doing. (Did we miss a file extension that you use? Tell us in the comments.)
• If you don’t have the enclosure links visible (i.e. “Show Link fields” is set to “No”), we auto-add and auto-delete the enclosure links for your video uploads. If you do have the enclosure links visible, we’ll auto-add but not auto-delete.
• Due propers to my hometown pals at Ambrosia Software for adding Intel support to Snapz Pro X, which was used to record the demo videos.
  

Introducing Blogger in draft and video upload

Today we're announcing an exciting new feature, video upload, and an exciting new place to use it: Blogger in draft. We’re excited.

You can think of draft as Blogger’s laboratory: it has features that we’re playing around with, trying out, and aren’t ready to “publish” to the main site.

Our first drafted feature is video upload. We’ve added a new button to the post editor () that pops up a dialog you can use to upload a video right into your blog post. If you have an Akita and a hat, you could make something that looks like this:

The comments are open, so let us know what you think! Also read the video upload FAQ for even more information.

Curious about Blogger in draft? We wrote a FAQ about that, too.

Update, 6/20: Read the latest blog post for responses to your feedback.
Update, 6/22: Share your videos in the comments for this blog post.

Video Upload: FAQ

Frequenty Asked Questions for Video Upload on Blogger in draft

Why can’t I see the video upload icon?
The icon will only be visible in browsers that support the Compose mode editor (Firefox and Internet Explorer) and only when you’re logged in to draft.blogger.com.

Where are my videos hosted?
Videos uploaded through Blogger are hosted on Google Video.

Are my videos indexed or searchable?
No, your videos are kept private and will not be included in Google Video search.

How long does it take to upload and process a video?
Uploading a video may take a while, since videos tend to be very large files. However, the exact amount of time required will depend on the size of your specific video and the speed of your internet connection. The processing stage usually takes about five minutes. Blogger will display a status message below the post editor to let you know how this is going, and there will be a placeholder icon in your post to show where the video will appear.

Can I upload videos with spaces in the file name?
Not right now. Spaces in the video file name will cause an error during processing. Make sure to remove spaces before uploading.
Yes! (Updated 6/20)

Do uploaded videos count against my 1gig photo quota?
Nope! Upload as many videos as you like for now.

What is Blogger in draft?

Blogger in draft is a special version of Blogger where we try out new features before releasing them to everyone. Think of it as our sandbox, or laboratory, or just “Blogger + new things.” By taking your feedback and looking at what works and what doesn’t, we’ll be able to make features that much better when releasing them to everyone.

How can I use Blogger in draft? How can I stop using Blogger in draft?
To try out Blogger in draft, just go to http://draft.blogger.com/ and log in. If you want to stop using it and go back to “normal” Blogger, simply log in to http://www.blogger.com/ instead. Your blogs and posts are the same regardless of whether you use Blogger in draft or regular Blogger. The only difference is what you see in the interface.

What do I get on Blogger in draft?
Access to new features, functionality, and interfaces we’re trying out. To see what’s currently available on Blogger in draft, read the blog at http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/.

How do I let you know my opinion about something on Blogger in draft?
The Blogger in draft blog has comments enabled. Just find a post about the feature you want to talk about, and leave a comment!

Hey! Something changed completely or disappeared! What’s going on?
Features on Blogger in draft may be updated, changed, re-imagined, transmogrified, or removed at any time. Draft gives us the freedom to see what works and what doesn’t before we turn a feature on for everyone, so expect us to make changes — hopefully you’ll think they’re for the better!

If I’m logged in to Blogger in draft, will all my posts be saved as draft?
No, you can publish normally from Blogger in draft. We’re just being playful with the name; it has nothing specifically to do with posts that are saved as drafts. It’s the features that are “in draft,” not (necessarily) your posts.