New Feature: Star Ratings

With our new Star Ratings feature, your readers can easily rate your posts — or the things you post about — from one star to five stars with a single click, right from the post footer.

Think of Star Ratings as a mini-poll for each of your posts. If you blog about fashion, food, crafts, quotes, or art we think this will be particularly useful to you.

To enable Star Ratings, log it to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts page element and then check the “Show Star Ratings” checkbox.

You can customize the location of the stars within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box.

Additional Notes

• This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Star Ratings.
• The star ratings widget should blend seamlessly with most solid-colored blog backgrounds (one exception is Rounders, where the edges of the widget will be visible via a color change). The text and background colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
  
  • Foreground: textcolor, textColor
  • Backrgound: mainBgColor, bgcolor
• If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the Star Ratings. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Star Ratings code from a fresh template.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!

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.