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Last month we released two new stats gadgets to the Blogger in Draft testing ground; after hearing your feedback and making a few tweaks, we’re happy to announce that they are both now ready for the main stage. The new-and-improved Popular Post s and Blog’s Stats gadgets can be added to your blog right now from the Gadget Directory by clicking Add a gadget from the Design | Page Elements tab. Both of these gadgets take advantage of the traffic data that is being collected by Blogger Stats and provide an easy way for you to pass that info on to the readers of your blog. The Popular Posts gadget will automatically find and display your blog’s posts that have the most pageviews. You can choose whether to display image thumbnails or post snippets in addition to the post title. You can also choose the time window to be used for calculating pageviews and the number of posts you’d like to display. The Blog’s Stats gadget lets you show off pageview data for your blog, with a handful of co...

Guest post by Rick Calvert, CEO of BlogWorld & New Media Expo When the Google Blogger team asked me to write a guest post for the Blogger Blog, I really didn’t know where to start. Today it occurred to me that the story of how I found Blogger might be a good place. I have been reading and commenting on blogs since the year 2000. I am a news and political junkie so most of the blogs I read were political. Tons of them were hosted right here on Blogger. I was amazed at the original news being reported; the insightful commentary and opinion; the incredibly moving personal stories from Milbloggers and their families and yes the crazy conspiracy theories. This Blogging thing was really incredible. Who were all these smart people? So many times I wished I could be a blogger, but I wasn’t a techie or a geek and it just seemed like it would be too difficult. Fast forward to 2005; I was in the middle of my two-hour daily commute home on the 91 freeway out of Los Angeles and listening to ...

When it comes to design, sometimes less can be more. This is the mantra behind our newest variant Super Simple , freshly-released to the Template Designer this week. We’ve taken the original Simple variant and stripped it down to the bare essentials, putting your actual blog content front and center on the page. As with all of our variants, you are free to tweak all of the individual elements and styles to your liking. And if you are looking to design a fancy blog template from scratch, the Super Simple variant is also a great frame to build upon. You can check out the new variant right now in the Template Designer, under the Simple category. As always, our ears are open to your feedback, so please feel free to let us know what you think .

Posted by Wongoo Lee, Software Engineer We know that personalizing your blog is important. Although you can adjust templates, layouts, backgrounds and more with our Template Designer , you wanted more ways to make your blog completely unique. Now you can use your own image as your blog background. Go to Design | Template Designer | Background , click on Background Image , and you’ll see the new “ Upload image ” option, which allows you to select and upload your image. There are a variety of options such as alignment, repeat, and scroll for how to display your new image. This feature is another graduate from Blogger in Draft . You can find more information in our original announcement . Tips from the Blogger team : If you want a full-screen background, we recommend using an image that's 1800 pixels wide and 1600 pixels high, so that the background image can fill the entire screen even for the readers with large monitors. To make sure your blog loads quickly, background images must b...

Posted by Seth Shamban, Blogger Consumer Operations Last week we hosted Blogger’s 11th bday celebration , and a huge thanks goes out to everyone who helped us celebrate! Since we were only able to attend a few parties in person (which was awesome!), we enjoyed watching tweets, videos, and photos stream in at #bloggerfiesta. From the four hour conference for 90 people in Manila, Philippines to the three person casual rendezvous at a restaurant in Duluth, Georgia, we heard great stories from around the world about bloggers meeting each other face-to-face. Even though we’re an internet company, we know the importance of meeting in-person. It provides a great opportunity to learn from others, meet new folks and share tips. We loved that one Fiesta attendee even learned how to set up a custom domain. While we had some fun of our own last week (particularly in our Sydney office), our favorite stories are the ones you’ve shared. We’ve linked to some of our favorites below. If you have a stor...