Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for May 9th

We’ve made a handful of fixes to improve Blog List:

• A “See All” link when you’ve truncated the list
  
• Icon loading is deferred for better page responsiveness
• Post title now links to post’s permalink
• Newly-added blogs are highlighted on the configuration page
  
• More reliable adding and removing of blogs, and better feed and title detection
  

If you’ve customized the Blog List widget template at all via Edit HTML, you will need to reset the template to get some of these new features.

We’ve also made some visual and reliability fixes to the new Gadgets directory, particularly around adding custom gadgets.

Note: we’re looking into reports of bX-e441ek errors for some people who have added Blog List to their blogs. We hope to have a fix out for this presently.

Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for April 21st

Last week’s release fixed several bugs with blog list and scheduled posts:

Scheduled Posts

• Scheduled FTP publishes now work.
• Posts published via scheduling will trigger BlogSend emails.
• General reliability improvements.
  

Please try these out if you were having trouble with scheduled posts. We’re aiming to take this feature out of draft in the fairly near term, so we’d like to make sure that everything works.

Blog List

• Improved Blog List update reliability.
• Fixed bX codes on Blog*Spot when certain sites are added to a Blog List.
• Removed bolding of blog titles.
• Usability and cosmetic improvements to the Blog List configuration dialog.

Unified Gadget / Page Element Directory

As part of our roll-out of Google Gadget support, we’ve unified the gadgets and page elements directories on Blogger in draft. Just click on the “Layout” tab and then click an “Add Gadget” link to see the new look.

How is it working for you? Does the new presentation, and the new icons, make adding stuff to your blog easier?

Let us know if you find good gadgets, or especially if you make some of your own.

Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for Feburary 29th

We pushed out a few bug fixes to the latest Blogger in draft features last night:

• Renaming of feeds in the Blog List now works
• Correct cache invalidation so that changes to Blog List subscriptions will now be reflected immediately
• Scheduled posts now have correct permalinks

Enjoy!

Update, 3/4: Unfortunately the permalink problem for scheduled posts is not solved.

Update, 3/6: The permalink problem has been fixed.

New feature: Scheduled Posts

We’ve often heard that sometimes you’d like to write a post now and have it automatically published at some time in the future. We listened, and are pleased to say that this feature is ready for you to try out on Blogger in draft.

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.

Your scheduled posts appear in your Edit Posts list alongside your drafts and published posts. To un-schedule a post, simply save it as a draft any time before it gets published.

Remember: Like all features described on this blog, Scheduled Posts only work when you’ve logged in to http://draft.blogger.com/.

Leave your feedback in the comments!

Additional Notes:

• We know that some bloggers currently use future post dates in order to keep one post at the top of their blog for a while. Though we recommend that you use a Text page element for this, you can still get this old behavior with just one additional step. First, publish your post with the current date and time. This will publish it to your blog. Then, once it’s published, edit the post to change the date to the future and publish it again. We don’t re-schedule posts that are already published, so the post will stay on your blog but sort to the very top.
  
• As with published posts, the post editor does not autosave scheduled posts if you go back and edit them. You wouldn’t want the post to publish while you’re in the middle of editing it! You can save the scheduled post as a draft to remove the scheduling and this will turn autosave back on.
  
• In some testing we’ve found that schedule posting is not working for some FTP blogs. If you run across this, please let us know in the comments so we can try to track it down.
  

New Feature: Blog List

Bloggers often feature a list of their favorite blogs, called a “blogroll,” in the sidebar of their own blog. Our latest page element, Blog List, helps you do just that, but we’ve mixed it in with Google Reader to make it even more powerful and useful.

At its most basic, Blog List displays a list of links to your favorite blogs, with an optional icon. If you link to a blog with an Atom or RSS feed, however, the Blog List can show the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post.

You can set the number of blogs to show in the list and whether they should be sorted by update time or alphabetically by blog title.

You add blogs to your Blog List by entering blog or feed URLs directly, or by importing subscriptions from Google Reader. When you add by URL, Blogger will attempt to detect an Atom or RSS feed for it in order to show post and update information. If none is found, the blog will still be added to the Blog List, just as a simple link.

Please try this out! Add a Blog List (Or two! Or more!) to your blog and let us know what you think in the comments. We value your feedback, and will try to incorporate as much as we can before the Blog List goes big-time on www.blogger.com.

Remember: Like all features mentioned on this blog, you must log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ to add a Blog List.

Additional Notes

• The Blog List writes all links out in HTML so that, unlike JavaScript-based blogrolls, you pass PageRank goodness on to the blogs you link to.
• The icon next to a feed is taken from the favicon.ico file in the blog’s home directory. We currently do not support the “shortcut icon” link tag.
• Adding and removing blogs may not invalidate our cached version of your blog. If you’re having trouble seeing your changes, republish a post or make a small settings change to your blog. Update, 2/29: This has been fixed.
  
• Some blogs don’t link to their Atom and RSS feeds in a way that we can detect. In these cases, add the feed URL to the Blog List for best results.
  
• Only the blog admin who added the Blog List may edit and configure it. Why is that? You’ll find out later...

Using Blogger’s OpenID with any URL

One of the cool things with our recent OpenID release is that you can use your own website, blog, or URL as your OpenID and still use Blogger as your OpenID provider. In the OpenID world, this is called “delegation,” and all it means is that you can use your own non-Blog*Spot URL as your OpenID identity, but still log in to OpenID sites with the Google Account you use on Blogger.

For example, if you have a blog at http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com/ but own the website http://www.myurl.com/, you can easily OpenID-enable http://www.myurl.com/. Just add this HTML to the <head> section of http://www.myurl.com/:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com" />

(Obviously, change “http://yourbloggerblog.blogspot.com” to your own blog’s URL.)

You’re all set. You can now use http://www.myurl.com/ as your OpenID identity on any site that accepts OpenID authentication, and you will be directed to Blogger to sign in.