Blogger Newsletter -December, 2010

Hello Blogger user!

We know it’s been a little while since you’ve heard directly from us, so here we are again to spread the latest product news and updates from the Blogger Team.

Things have been very busy over here recently, as we’ve been working really hard to develop a number of new features while also building out new teams in global offices. Over the last few months we’ve put a lot of energy towards turning your suggestions into improvements to Blogger, and just in case you missed something along the way, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite updates for you to check out.

And while you’re busy reading through this list, we’ll be putting the final touches on the next round of exciting stuff. Make sure to stay tuned for 2011; we have big plans in store.

Features

Comment Filtering Hopefully you’ve noticed the new Comments tab in your dashboard, which we added over the summer as part of our upgrade to the comment system. This Comment Inbox is a centralized place where you can manage all of your comment-related tasks, like delete published comments, manage comments that have been flagged as spam, and moderate awaiting comments (if you’ve enabled Comment Moderation). We’ve also started analyzing all posted comments in our system, and are automatically classifying the ones we believe to be spam. Similar to Gmail’s spam filtering, you can help us improve our classifiers by telling us whether the comments we’ve caught are actually spam. Stats The Stats tab is another recent addition to the dashboard, and is the hub for all your blog’s realtime traffic data. Pageviews, reader location, browser types, popular posts, and referral sources are just a few of the pieces of information we’re constantly collecting for each blog.  If you want to show off your blog’s traffic data to your readers, we’ve also built Blog Stats and Popular Posts gadgets which you can add to your template. These can be added from the Gadget Directory at any time, and have a variety of configurable options to change the display and data layout. Background Image Upload Earlier in the summer we released our Template Designer to all users, and asked for your feedback about what other features we could add to make it even better. By far the top request was the ability to upload your own background image, and we’re happy to say that this feature is now live within the Template Designer. To upload your own background image to your blog, simply click on the Background section within the Template Designer. Mobile BlogSpot We realize that more and more users are accessing the web on smartphones, and we want to make sure that blogs still look nice when viewed on these smaller screens. We’ve put a lot of work into creating a mobile version of BlogSpot, which will automatically detect if a blog is accessed on a smartphone and then display a mobile-optimized version. Mobile BlogSpot is live now on Blogger in Draft, and can be enabled from the Settings | Email & Mobile tab. From there you can also check out a mobile preview version of your blog to see what it will look like. Web Fonts The Google Web Fonts team has made great progress on expanding font options across the web, especially for non-Latin alphabets like Cyrillic and Greek. We’ve taken advantage of their work and now offer 40 new Web Fonts in the Template Designer on Blogger in Draft. For the full list, check out our Help Center article. From Our Friends Other helpful services recommended the Blogger Team OpenSky The folks at OpenSky have built a great service which connects you with small e-tailers to write about their products on your personal blog. You can search for the products and services which interest you, and then pass those recommendations to your readers while splitting all profits 50/50. The best part is that OpenSky takes care of all of the order processing, fulfillment, and customer service. It’s one of the best affiliate programs we’ve come across, and it’s a great chance to help your readers discover interesting and relevant products.