Features and Bug Fixes for August 14th

Today’s release to Blogger in draft brings one new feature: Reactions, which are customizable one-click buttons below your posts. Read more on our announcement post, and try them out on this blog.

We’ve added better show/hide controls and brought back the post count and Blogs of Note to the new dashboard, and published it to the main Blogger site.

In case you missed it, we moved Google Gadgets and the gadget directory to the main Blogger site as well.

This release also has some fixes to other Blogger in draft features:

New Post Editor

• Edit HTML mode now has a toolbar.
• The Compose toolbar gets a fifth font size, and “Normal” should now more correctly match the font size on your blog.
• Newly added images will correctly pick up the border styles from your blog’s template.

Import / Export

• Basic settings are now saved and restored.
• Templates (both Classic and Layouts) are saved and restored.
• Exporting a blog will now cause the XML file to download in Safari.
• Import blog messaging now distinguishes between published and draft posts.

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.

New Feature: New Dashboard

Our old dashboard was getting a little cramped, so we reorganized things and gave everything a fresh, new look. You can see this now by logging in to Blogger in draft.

The new dashboard contains all of the same information that the old one did, but rearranged to emphasize the most important content and changes (and with a little more room for future goodness).

By default, only some of your blogs are shown in the dashboard, although there’s a link you can click to display all of them. The blogs we show by default include the two blogs you most recently published to, as well as any with unmoderated comments or ToS/spam warnings.

Please try this out and let us know what you think in the comments! Your feedback is an important part of our design process and we’d like to know what you think before we release this re-design out into the wild.

Remember: Not sure where some of your blogs went? Click the “Display all blogs” link at the bottom.