Know

Have opinions about Blogger? If so, we'd like to meet you. We are looking for participants willing to document their blogging practices over a few weeks and answer some interview questions. This will help us better understand your needs and keep improving Blogger. Interested? Sign up here . Thanks!

by Lu Chen , Blogger Summer Intern (Philadelphia, PA) Last October we launched a comments feature that let you embed comments and the commenting form below your blog posts. Today we have extended embedded comments to display profile images next to the comments that your visitors write. Though profile images have been available with the other commenting options, we are happy to bring them to embedded comments as part of the Blogger Birthday feature series . We've also made it much easier to upload a profile photo when you leave a comment on a Blogger blog. From the comment preview, click "Add photo" to upload a photo to your Blogger profile. The next time you comment on a Blogger blog, your profile photo will be displayed next to your comment. To enable or disable profile images in your blog's comments, go to Settings | Comments . Cheers to photo-filled comments! This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday . Happy Birthday!

Guest Post by Caroline Vanderlip, SharedBook CEO To continue Blogger's 10th anniversary celebration, I’m delighted to announce that Blog2Print has now partnered with Blogger . Blog2Print lets you publish some or all of your posts and photos as a professionally-printed, full-color book. Since 2007, thousands of Blogger users have become Blog2Print fans, using our easy and quick service to save and share all their favorite writings with friends and family or to keep a hard-copy version of their work. You can make books by season, by year, by event or even by theme, and you can choose from soft cover or hard cover versions of your book. Your book from Blog2Print.com can include selected comments from your posts, and you can also add your own additional photos and new comments as you edit your book to make a unique edition for posterity. Blog2Print is easy to use – just enter your blog URL , select the date range for the posts you’d like to include, and choose a cover from among the ...

Guest Post by Will Price, CEO of Widgetbox In honor of Blogger’s 10 birthday , all of us at Widgetbox are excited to announce a partnership with Blogger that allows you to quickly and easily turn your blog into a widget . Whether you want to add your blog’s headlines to your main website, let your fans showcase your content to their audience, or you want a widget that helps make your content more discoverable across the web, Widgetbox-powered widgets will help you get the most visibility for your content, while eliminating the need for any manual updating or management. For example, the Blogger Buzz widget below was made in seconds and includes posts, images, and Blogger Buzz branding: Key Benefits? The easiest way to build a widget from your blog Colorful, interactive, and engaging Easy to add to Blogger and sites across the web As you update your blog, the widget automatically updates with the latest posts, headlines, and images Helps you reach new readers and drive traffic back...

by Ross Peter Nelson, Software Engineer, Google Calendar Do you have an event you'd like to invite your readers to?  Thanks to Blogger Gadgets, this is now a piece of cake.  Click the  Customize  link in the toolbar, and go to the  Layout  tab.  There, you'll see the  Add a Gadget  link. The Event Gadget is currently one of the featured gadgets, or you can add it directly by clicking "add your own" and entering the URL  http://www.google.com/ig/ modules/calendar/socialevent/ bloggerevent.xml .  You'll then be taken to a configuration page that lets you enter information about your event. Once you click Save , it will be visible on your blog for everyone to see. The gadget allows your readers to indicate whether they are going to attend the event, and lets them see which of their  FriendConnect  friends will be there too. In addition, anyone with a Google Calendar account can simply click a link to have that event added to ...

by Sean McCullough, Software Engineer, Blogger It's time to announce another Blogger Birthday feature! Many users have been asking for an easy way to implement "Read more" links on their blog's index page. In fact, for years bloggers have been implementing "Read more" jump breaks themselves by manually editing their HTML --- a process that was complicated and error prone. Today we are excited to announce our latest birthday present: Jump Breaks . With Jump Breaks you can show just a snippet of your post on your blog's index page. Blogger will insert a "Read more" link to the full post page where your readers can keep reading. There are a couple of ways to insert a "Read more" jump to your posts. If you use the new post editor (available on Blogger in Draft , or by enabling it via the Settings tab ), you'll notice the "Insert jump break" icon in the editor's toolbar. Click this icon and the "jump break" wi...

by Chang Kim, Product Manager, Blogger More and more of you are using Google Chrome ( more than 30 million active users now !), and we want to let you know that a Blogger extension is included in the Chrome Extensions gallery. The BlogThis! Chrome extension is available now, one of several hundred extensions to be found in the Chrome extensions gallery . Using the BlogThis! Chrome extension, you can start writing a blog post in one click. Whenever you are inspired by a web page you are looking at and want to blog about it, just click on the BlogThis! button on your Chrome toolbar, and the Blogger post editor opens up with a pre-populated link to the web page you were on. If you want to include any text in your post, simply highlight it before clicking on the BlogThis! button. Edit the post as you'd like, and publish it instantly or save it as a draft for future posting. To try out the BlogThis! Chrome extension, first switch to Google Chrome BETA (if you are not already on that v...

Guest Post by Joe Marchese, SocialVibe CEO In honor of Blogger's 10th anniversary, we are excited to announce that you can now use your blogs to create positive, measurable social change. By adding the SocialVibe gadget to your blog, you'll be turning brand dollars into real charitable donations for the cause of your choice. The World Wildlife Foundation, Nature Conservancy, DonorsChoose, Invisible Children, and Charity:Water are just a few of the great charities you can support on Blogger. Once you install the SocialVibe sidebar gadget on your blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the gadget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip). You can switch your cause and sponsor as often as you like, and receive regular updates from your charity about goal progress and impact. Thus far, SocialVibe has been able to raise over $500,000 for charities, and we know the Blogger community will be able to significantly increase this amount. In fact, we are setting...

We're very happy to announce today that Blogger now has a home on the iPhone. The team behind BlogPress (a popular app already available in the iPhone App Store) decided to build a free version of BlogPress just for Blogger users to celebrate Blogger's 10th birthday. BlogPress Lite packs many of the great Blogger features you have come to know into a simple yet powerful mobile application for blogging on the go. Rich-text WYSIWYG editing, image uploads, labels, configurable settings, and auto-save are among the many features that are part of BlogPress Lite, as well as a handful of other optimizations for the iPhone experience. Landscape editing mode is supported and will feel very familiar for iPhone users, and blog posts are automatically saved when you have an incoming call—you won't have to ever worry about losing a post. We're grateful to the team at InfoThinker for adding to the birthday "party." The app has been submitted to the App Store and should b...