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Going to be in Austin, Texas for South By Southwest? Blogger is! And we're throwing a party with our friends from Google Reader. Come, drink, and talk blogs.

Party is at Six Lounge (117 W 4th St @ Colorado) on Sunday, March 15th from 10pm - 1am. Bring your SXSW Interactive Badge, or find a Blogger or Google Reader team member at the conference and ask for an invitation. You'll recognize us by our schwag. 

See you there! 

(cross posted from Blogger In Draft)

Calling all Developers! We've just launched several extensions to the Gadget API that will enable developers to build more relevant and engaging gadgets for Blogger.

As you may already know, every Blogger blog is a gadget container. What's more, every blog is an OpenSocial gadget container powered by Friend Connect. This means that as a gadget developer you can leverage social APIs to build engaging tools for bloggers and their audience.

In addition to leveraging social data, gadgets can now access a blog's post and comment feed via new JSON APIs. For example, with this data you could easily build a map gadget that maps the geo-location of posts, or a "Most Commented On" gadget that ranks posts by the number of comments they've received.

Need to be inspired? Recently we asked our users what gadgets they most wanted to see in Blogger. Hundreds responded and here's their wish list.

When you build a gadget for Blogger, it becomes available to millions of active bloggers. Just submit your gadget to us, and within minutes it will surface in the Blogger gadget directory where users can easily browse, configure, and add your gadget to their blog's sidebar.

So now that you know Blogger is a great distribution platform for your gadget, what are you waiting for? Get started building Gadgets for Blogger now.

Important Note: The APIs and documentation are new, so there may be bugs. Let us know by posting to the Blogger Developer Group if you run into problems developing your gadget.

We are receiving reports that some users cannot access Blogger in Europe. We are investigating.

Users are experiencing problems playing videos in Blogger blogs. We are investigating and will send an update when fixed.

Fret not! Rather than see our users' templates break, we built a tool to preserve these links and host the affected files. To find out if your blog is affected, login to your Blogger Dashboard. If we've detected that your blog template contains links to Google Page Creator, you will see the following warning:

Blogger and Google Reader are throwing a party at South by South West and you're invited! We'll be debuting a very special feature at the party, so come celebrate with the Blogger and Google Reader teams. Drinks, food, tunes, swag, and good times will be in full effect.

by Siobhan Quinn, Blogger Product Manager​

In the Template Designer, you’ll find:

• 15 new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of professional background images from iStockphoto
• Customizable colors, fonts, and more!

We have more details and tips in our Blogger Template Designer post on the Blogger in Draft blog.

We worked with iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace, to put together a great collection of beautiful images and patterns to use as backgrounds on your blogs. The photos are stunning, and are free to use on your Blogger blog.

That being said, today’s launch is just the beginning. We’ll add more of our own designs over the coming weeks and months and, through the new Template Design Group, we’ll be working with members of the Blogger design community to bring their templates into the new Template Designer.



Help test drive the Blogger Template Designer by logging into Blogger In Draft, and learn more about the new features in more detail on the Blogger In Draft blog.