Updates and Bug Fixes

Today’s Blogger release is a big one for Blogger . Let’s lead off with the quick stuff:

• Google Gadget integration continues to improve, with better editing of gadget preferences.


• The new look for the Dashboard has seen a handful of tweaks, including a new button style that we’re trying out and, by popular demand, the “show all blogs” toggle is now sticky.


• The subscribe page element has been published to WWW.


• We’ve added a “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” to the Blogger in Draft dashboard, so now you don’t have to remember to type “draft.blogger.com” instead of “www.blogger.com.”


• So you can easily keep up with the news, we’ve added this blog as a tab on the Blogger in Draft Dashboard.

But that’s not what you came here for. You wanted this:

• Webmaster Tools Verification. Turn this on to automatically add and verify all your blogs on Google’s Webmaster Tools.


• Star ratings. Add a 0–5 star rating control to the bottom of your posts so that your readers can rate them.


• Import / export of blogs. Back up all of your posts and comments to one Atom XML file on your computer, and import your posts from one blog to another.


• Embedded comment form. By incredibly popular demand, we’ve brought the comment form to your blog’s post pages, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.


• New post editor. We’ve completely revised the post editor, bringing in drag-and-drop image placement and better HTML handling.

As always, these features are on Blogger in Draft because we’re not done with them and we’re looking for your feedback. Please read the posts for each of the features before trying them so that you know what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure you leave comments! These are big features for us, so we want to get them right before we turn them on for everyone.

Features and Bug Fixes

Today’s release to Blogger in draft brings one new feature: Reactions, which are customizable one-click buttons below your posts. Read more on our announcement post, and try them out on this blog.

We’ve added better show/hide controls and brought back the post count and Blogs of Note to the new dashboard, and published it to the main Blogger site.

In case you missed it, we moved Google Gadgets and the gadget directory to the main Blogger site as well.

This release also has some fixes to other Blogger in draft features:

New Post Editor

• Edit HTML mode now has a toolbar.
• The Compose toolbar gets a fifth font size, and “Normal” should now more correctly match the font size on your blog.
• Newly added images will correctly pick up the border styles from your blog’s template.

Import / Export

• Basic settings are now saved and restored.
• Templates (both Classic and Layouts) are saved and restored.
• Exporting a blog will now cause the XML file to download in Safari.
• Import blog messaging now distinguishes between published and draft posts.

Feature Updates and Bug Fixes

We’ve just released a few fixes to some of the features currently here on Blogger in draft.

Reactions gets some visual improvements, including fixes for display in IE 6 and overall spacing fixes. We’ve also tweaked the HTML and images to make it load a bit more quickly.

We’ve fixed an Import / Export bug that was truncating the export of comments. Also, importing scheduled posts will keep them scheduled instead of publishing them immediately.

We’re bringing the Embedded Comment Form closer to feature parity with the full page comment form by adding e-mail subscription for follow up comments. If you’re logged in, you can now also subscribe to comments without posting one of your own. We’ve also added improved color matching in the form for all browsers.