Know

by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger As a blog author, you've probably spent more than a little time getting exactly the right "look" for your blog. A blog is an outlet for creative expression, and how your blog looks says as much about you as what is written on it. And we at Blogger are committed to giving you the tools to make a great-looking blog. The Blog*Spot navigation bar ("navbar") is one area where we realized that there was some room for improvement. Our four traditional color scheme choices — Blue, Black, Tan, and Silver — are somewhat limited, especially if your blog's background color is lime green or hot pink . That's why we have added two new color schemes — "Transparent Light" and "Transparent Dark." These new color schemes take advantage of the ability of modern browsers to render transparency (a technique known to web designers as "alpha blending"). This allows the navbar background to blend together with ...

As we close the chapter on the first ten years over here on Blogger, the team couldn't be more excited about the possibilities that lie ahead over the next ten. And while we've got some great things planned already, we know that the ideas and passion of the Blogger community will inspire us further. So in that spirit, we're going to once again ask for some help writing out the next chapter of Blogger. Only this time, we mean it quite literally :-) We'd like you to take a second to think about where Blogger is today, and then where you'd like to see it in the future. What are some words that come to mind? How would you describe it? Specifically, we're looking for six adjectives—three to describe the present, and three to describe hopes for the future. And when you've come up with them, please take a second to let us know what you are thinking . Once we've heard what everyone has to say, we'll follow-up here to share the results. Once again, we really ...

Guest post by Robin Beck, Blog Action Day This is Robin Beck here from Blog Action Day central, and I want to thank Rick and the Blogger team for helping support Blog Action Day 2009. For those of you who don’t know, Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15th where bloggers across the world unite to write about a single issue on a single day.  We like to think of it as one big blogfest for good, and our goal is to spark conversation on an issue of importance across the web. This year’s topic is climate change, and we’ve thus far had more than 4,000 bloggers from 123 countries register, including many of the world’s largest blogs. Our aim is to make Blog Action Day 2009 the largest social change event on the web as a demonstration of global concern about the climate crisis. To achieve this, we want to invite the entire Blogger community to get involved and commit to writing a single post about climate change on your blog on October 15th. You can register your blog ...

While October is to many a month of candy and costumes, it also happens to be National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the U.S. In that spirit, we thought we'd take a minute to look at a few different things you can do to make sure both your content and account are secure on Blogger. Third Party Code Adding site counters, templates, and other third-party code to your blog can be a great way to add some flare to your content, but can also leave your blog vulnerable to malicious activity if you aren't familiar with its source. Over the years we've seen a number of third party scripts disguise themselves as helpful add-ons, when in fact they are performing a malicious operation behind the scenes. For example, a site counter widget may indeed be providing your blog with helpful tracking data, but at the same time may also be discreetly sending that information to advertisers for the purpose of collecting the online habits of your readers. A blog template you downloaded from ...

Last week, Google Sidewiki  launched to the world as an entirely new way to share information across the web. This new Google Toolbar feature allows you to contribute your own insight to any webpage, as well as read information shared by others right in your browser's sidebar. Google Sidewiki uses a special relevancy algorithm to display the most helpful entries first, and also has built-in technology to display your entries on other sites which contain the same snippet of text. For a more in-depth look at how it all works, as well as a full overview of all the features that Google Sidewiki has to offer, the team put together a very helpful page which you can check out  here . One feature in particular did catch our attention here on the Blogger team, and that is the ability to post your Google Sidewiki entires directly to your blog. You can watch a quick video tutorial of how it all works below: So if you haven't already, download the Google Toolbar  and give Sidewiki ...