Blogger handed out some schwags like the Blogger Gloves shown above, to the attendees of SXSW. Winner’s like almost over here at the Northern Hemisphere, 5 more days to go. :)
[photo by Michael Cote, used under a CC-license]
Blogger Buzz today announced that bloggers* can now sign up for GrandCentral - a web-based voice communications platform Google acquired last year - without going through all the hassles of requesting for an invitation. To directly sign up for this service (still in beta), just go to this Blogger Invite page on GrandCentral and register your number.
The service is currently for U.S. users only, or at least, you will need a U.S. phone number to activate it.
GrandCentral is like super awesome because my friends can call me & leave me messages without my phone ringing. Hearing phones ring make my head asplodes.
* I think that anyone can register, not just bloggers. However, they ARE targeting bloggers at this point.
Blogger in Draft recently released two new features, Blog List and Scheduled Posts.
Blog List is a bit more than an ordinary blog roll you see on most blogs. Not only that it can display “a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon,” but it can also “show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post” if the blog you link to has a RSS or Atom feed. You can find this under Add a New Element in Layout.
Another new feature, Scheduled Posts, lets Blogger users to schedule when to publish a saved post in a set future time (that’s before Dec. 31, 9999).
Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.
I played with this feature a little bit and found two minor problems: 1) they only display the year in two digits, which is not a really huge deal today but it could be a bit confusing sometimes (see above, one is 1999 and the other is 2099) and, 2) sort of related to number 1, when you enter the scheduled date, the year is in two digits. If I am to enter “99″ it’s set to 1999, but if I enter “08″ it will be 2008. A date chooser will probably help, a lot.
Y2K called, they want their bugs back. :)
When Blogger enabled OpenID commenting on Blogger blogs, they hinted on their blog that they are working to become an OpenID provider. Today, they announced that Blogger users can now use their own blog URL as an OpenID identity. Since this new feature is still experimental, you will need to enable it in Blogger Draft, under Edit Profile. When enabled, Google will add the following code to ALL your blogs, which means that you can use any of your (public) Blogger blogs as an OpenID identity.
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g” />
Yahoo! announced yesterday that they will be supporting OpenID beginning the 30th of this month.
[via Google Operating System]
Blogger in Draft is now testing a new feature that enables bloggers to allow reader comments with OpenID, “a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet” used by millions of users and supported by thousands of sites. [”What is OpenID?” - OpenID.net]
To enable this feature for your blog, you will need to log onto Blogger in Draft here, and go to the Setting page of the blog you want to enable this feature. Then go to the Comments tab and check the “Registered Users - includes OpenID” option under “Who Can Comment?” Jump to the bottom, click “Save Settings” and you are done.
When commenting you will see the option to choose your identity as either a Blogger, AOL, TypeKey, WordPress, or Any OpenID user (and frequently allow to post anonymously). Comments that are posted with OpenID as the user’s identity will have a 
by the comment.
Good, WordPress.com doesn’t support this yet. And Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, complains to the Blogger team, “Very cool! One request: Capitalize the P in WordPress.” :-)
Every once in a while, there would be an unsatisfied ex-Blogger user telling you all the reasons why they have stopped using the service and use something else (read: WordPress) instead. Out of all the reasons, the lack of the ability to create static pages - pages that are separated from the blog posts, like the About page on this blog - is perhaps the most common one.
This is also when *cough* Superman Haochi comes into rescue, he created a little script which you can put in your Blogger blog’s template and snap, you’ll have some nice little pages on your blog to show off to your colleagues. Okay, it’s not that easy, but you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to use it. All it takes is editing & uploading some files, and copy & paste two lines of code. The full instruction can be found on the Readme file.
Note that since this script is JavaScript based, the pages are less than likely to be indexed by search engines, and will not work if your site’s visitors have JavaScript disabled for your site. There are a lot of downsides of using this script, and I won’t point out all of them, but at least, you have some nice little pages on your blog. :)
Demo is here, and you can download all the files, including the Readme.htm here in ZIP format. As always, ask me if you have any question (note that I might not be able to reply all).
Blogger now has an option that enables commentators with Google account to get email notifications whenever new comments are posted on the specific post. All you need to do is check the box where it says “Email follow-up comments to username@domain.tld“.
This is great for posts that have on going discussions, but sometimes they can be really irritating. If that’s the case, it’s possible to unsubscribe them by clicking the “Unsubscribe” link in the emails you received or the one that’s on the comment page.
Blogger just launched Blogger Play (warning: can be addictive), a slideshow tool that showcases photos that have just uploaded to Blogger in real time. By default all photos from Blogger’s public blog listing will be included as part of Blogger Play, if you don’t want your images to appear in Blogger Play, you can opt-out by removing your blog from the Blogger’s public blog listing.
If you ask me, I will tell you that it looks a bit like the one that Flickr has. I don’t know why, I just do. And by the way, it works on the iPhone, according to Googler Pete Hopkins.
Happy birthday to Blogger, it just turned 8 today!
Blogger’s 8-year history, from Wikipedia:
Happy birthday to Blogger again, it shows how much the Web has changed - we rarely ask “Wow, where do I enter my credit card number?” now.
Blogger now has a new feature that allows users to find other users that share the same interests, work in the same industry, or living in the same area. What determines the ordering of the results is by the blogs’ last update time, not the crazy PageRank. Hey, sploggers, don’t forget to fill your Blogger profile with popular keywords. :)
To use this feature, you will need to go to a Blogger profile page and follow the links on their page. The problem is that they don’t provide you an search interface. Hehe, this is where Haochi comes in rescue*.
Cool, I caught Darnell Clayton of Inside Orkut updating his blogs. :)
*the location one is not working properly because they use multiple parameter. The name one isn’t working either. I might work on that later. :)
Google is slowly integrating FeedBurner and Google services. Blogger today introduced a new feature that allows users to redirect their feed traffics to FeedBurner so that your FeedBurner subscriber count would be more accurate.
To enable this new feature, go to Settings->Site Feed under the blog that you want to change, scroll down to Post Feed Redirect URL then enter your FeedBurner URL there. Since this feature is not limited only to FeedBurner, you can also enter URL from other feed mashing services where your feeds are hosted on.
They are using the 302 (Moved Temporarily) redirect for this, if you are into these kind of stuff. :)-
On a related note, Blogger’s Polls feature that announced two weeks ago has “graduated from Blogger in Draft“.
Blogger in Draft today released two new features, Polls and Enclosure Links. The polls feature allows Blogger users to add polls to the sidebar as a page element, but it would be a lot nicer if you can also add polls inside blog posts. (which is possible, with a bit of work)
Here are a fews cool things:
Another feature, Enclosure Links, let’s you turn your blog post into a podcast. To enable this feature, you will need to go to Settings -> Formatting and set the “Show Link fields” option to “Yes“. Then go back to the post editor and you will find a “Show enclosure links” link, click there, and get started. :)
Also, Blogger now speaks 17 more languages. :)
