New Feature: 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.

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.