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!

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.

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!

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.