Author Archive

We're currently experiencing issues with the photo upload feature which may prevent users from adding photos to their blogs.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope to have it resolved shortly.

Update: This is now fixed. Thanks for your patience.

Over the years we've heard lots of great ideas for promoting your blog, and have been compiling them here as a handy reference. From simply adding links to enabling cool newer features such as Following, we're always happy to update the page when we stumble across something new.

Our latest addition comes from our friends at TypePad, who have put together a great video on How to add your blog feed to your Facebook profile. After trying this ourselves, we've found that integrating your blog feed into your Facebook profile can be a really effective way to keep your friends updated on the latest from your blog.

So if you've been looking for slick new ways to expand your blog's audience, check out the video and give it a shot!

Blogger will be undergoing maintenance Thursday, February 12th for about 30 minutes.

While most of Blogger should not be affected, we are expecting the image upload feature to be unavailable during this time.

Update: The maintenance is complete.

Due to an upcoming Picasa maintenance, image uploading will be unavailable for about 30 minutes on Tuesday, April 21 at 4:00PM PDT.

Update: This has been canceled and will be rescheduled for next week. We'll make a new post once we have a firm time set.

Over the years we've learned that some of the best insight into Blogger comes from you guys, the millions of users who use it every day. So we thought it'd be a great idea to open up the floor for feedback, and provide an easy way to let us know what you'd like to see.

With the help of Product Ideas, we've created a forum which allows you to submit and vote on new feature suggestions, gadget recommendations, and even Blogs of Note! The more feedback we get the better, so please take a moment to check it out, and then tell your friends.

We'll be keeping a close eye on all of the responses, so please stay tuned! We'll keep the forum open until Friday, May 14th.

The fine print: All support issues should still be directed to the help group. Off-topic submissions may be removed by the team. And Blogs of Note is for Blogger blogs only ;-)

Image uploading will be unavailable for the next half hour due to PicasaWeb maintenance.

Update: The maintenance is now complete. Thanks for your patience.

Two weeks ago we asked for your feedback about what you'd like to see on Blogger, and you've responded overwhelmingly! Since we opened the Product Ideas forum, we've received over 60,000 votes from 2500 users on 1500 different suggestions. We're very interested in the ideas we've seen so far, and hope that you keep them coming until the form closes on Friday, May 14th.

In the meantime though, we've noticed a few things on the Feature Request list that already have solutions, and we'd like to pass that information along to you:

• Importing blogs from Wordpress
  

While we don't offer this feature directly within the Blogger UI, a handy little service called Wordpress2Blogger (which is hosted on App Engine) will help you convert your Wordpress blog into a Blogger blog. Then from your dashboard, click "Import" to import the converted file.

• Feeds for labels

This can be done easily using the following URL structure:

http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABELNAME
Example: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/mobile

• Feeds for Comments

This feed is also available now, with the following URL:

http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
Example: http://adsense.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

• ShareThis widget for Blogger
  

The ShareThis widget can be added easily from their website, which supports Blogger blogs.

• Multi-selects on posts to add labels in bulk
  

The Edit Posts list already support multi-selecting, so feel free to bulk-label to your heart's desire :-)

• "Democratic" Blog of Note voting process

That's what the Blog of Note section of the Product Ideas page is for! We'll be posting many more of your suggested Blogs of Note, so please do keep an eye out.

Again, we really do appreciate all the great feedback and suggestions we've seen so far. We hope that you will continue to add more to the Product Ideas page over the next week, and make sure to get all of your votes in before the forum closes Friday, May 14th.

Tweeting your new blog posts is a great way to engage your readers, and something that many on the team have taken advantage of for our own blogs. An easy way to do this is through Twitterfeed, which automatically updates Twitter with each new blog post. Here's how to set it up:

Head on over to the Twitterfeed site, click Sign In with OpenID and type in your Blogger blog's URL. Once you've registered you'll then be taken to the New Feed page where you can start linking blog feeds to your Twitter account.

First click the Connect your feed to Twitter Account button, which will prompt you to enter your Twitter login credentials to authorize Twitterfeed's access. You will get a nice little confirmation once you've successfully linked up your Twitter Account.


Next just enter a name for your feed, as well as your blog's Feed URL into the form. If you want to customize your feed's settings you can modify frequency, add prefixes, and even create keyword filters. Otherwise you're all set—click the Create Feed button and your Twitterfeed is enabled.

You can always come back later to the Twitterfeed site and modify your feed settings, as well as look at click-through metrics for existing feeds.

We're very happy to announce today that Blogger now has a home on the iPhone. The team behind BlogPress (a popular app already available in the iPhone App Store) decided to build a free version of BlogPress just for Blogger users to celebrate Blogger's 10th birthday. BlogPress Lite packs many of the great Blogger features you have come to know into a simple yet powerful mobile application for blogging on the go.

Rich-text WYSIWYG editing, image uploads, labels, configurable settings, and auto-save are among the many features that are part of BlogPress Lite, as well as a handful of other optimizations for the iPhone experience. Landscape editing mode is supported and will feel very familiar for iPhone users, and blog posts are automatically saved when you have an incoming call—you won't have to ever worry about losing a post.


We're grateful to the team at InfoThinker for adding to the birthday "party." The app has been submitted to the App Store and should be available shortly. (We'll update this post when we see it.)

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Google Sidewiki uses a special relevancy algorithm to display the most helpful entries first, and also has built-in technology to display your entries on other sites which contain the same snippet of text. For a more in-depth look at how it all works, as well as a full overview of all the features that Google Sidewiki has to offer, the team put together a very helpful page which you can check out here.

One feature in particular did catch our attention here on the Blogger team, and that is the ability to post your Google Sidewiki entires directly to your blog. You can watch a quick video tutorial of how it all works below:



So if you haven't already, download the Google Toolbar and give Sidewiki a try. As you come up with new ideas, submit them on the Sidewiki product ideas page!