4 New Gadgets from Blogger Buster

Amanda from Blogger Buster has developed 4 new gadgets for your blog's sidebar.

	Display thumbnails of your most recent Picasa photos. Add it now
	Share your recent Twitter updates Add it now
	Show your most recent posts, with optional summaries Add it now
	Show your most recent comments, with optional summaries Add it now

To add these gadgets go to your blog's Layout tab, click Add a Gadget, and then click Featured. There you'll find Amanda's gadgets along with other gadgets we are currently featuring.


You can stay updated when featured third-party gadgets are added by subscribing to the Blogger Featured Gadget blog.

Interested in building useful gadgets for bloggers? Get started now by reading the Blogger Developer Documentation.


Note: Currently some third-party gadgets will not display correctly in the Chrome browser. We are working on a fix for this.

Updates and Bug Fixes for June 26th

Today’s Blogger release is a big one for Blogger in Draft. Let’s lead off with the quick stuff:

• Google Gadget integration continues to improve, with better editing of gadget preferences.


• The new look for the Dashboard has seen a handful of tweaks, including a new button style that we’re trying out and, by popular demand, the “show all blogs” toggle is now sticky.


• The subscribe page element has been published to WWW.


• We’ve added a “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” to the Blogger in Draft dashboard, so now you don’t have to remember to type “draft.blogger.com” instead of “www.blogger.com.”


• So you can easily keep up with the news, we’ve added this blog as a tab on the Blogger in Draft Dashboard.

But that’s not what you came here for. You wanted this:

• Webmaster Tools Verification. Turn this on to automatically add and verify all your blogs on Google’s Webmaster Tools.


• Star ratings. Add a 0–5 star rating control to the bottom of your posts so that your readers can rate them.


• Import / export of blogs. Back up all of your posts and comments to one Atom XML file on your computer, and import your posts from one blog to another.


• Embedded comment form. By incredibly popular demand, we’ve brought the comment form to your blog’s post pages, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.


• New post editor. We’ve completely revised the post editor, bringing in drag-and-drop image placement and better HTML handling.

As always, these features are on Blogger in Draft because we’re not done with them and we’re looking for your feedback. Please read the posts for each of the features before trying them so that you know what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure you leave comments! These are big features for us, so we want to get them right before we turn them on for everyone.

Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for June 6th

Today we have a couple of new features (more on those later in the day) and some bug fixes. We’ve also published Blog List, so it’s now available to everyone on the main Blogger site.

Here are the highlights:

• The Google Gadget page element configuration has been greatly improved. We’ve fixed a number of cosmetic and functionality issues in this area. Try it out with the new unified Gadget and Page Element directory.
• Adding feed URLs to a Blog List directly now works reliably for all supported feed types.
• Adding a blog with no detected feed to a Blog List now triggers a warning dialog and icon.

Everything working ok for you? Let us know in the comments.

Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for May 9th

We’ve made a handful of fixes to improve Blog List:

• A “See All” link when you’ve truncated the list
  
• Icon loading is deferred for better page responsiveness
• Post title now links to post’s permalink
• Newly-added blogs are highlighted on the configuration page
  
• More reliable adding and removing of blogs, and better feed and title detection
  

If you’ve customized the Blog List widget template at all via Edit HTML, you will need to reset the template to get some of these new features.

We’ve also made some visual and reliability fixes to the new Gadgets directory, particularly around adding custom gadgets.

Note: we’re looking into reports of bX-e441ek errors for some people who have added Blog List to their blogs. We hope to have a fix out for this presently.

Unified Gadget / Page Element Directory

As part of our roll-out of Google Gadget support, we’ve unified the gadgets and page elements directories on Blogger in draft. Just click on the “Layout” tab and then click an “Add Gadget” link to see the new look.

How is it working for you? Does the new presentation, and the new icons, make adding stuff to your blog easier?

Let us know if you find good gadgets, or especially if you make some of your own.

New Feature: Gadgets for your Blog

We’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!