Following feature

Blogger announced that they have a new feature called Following that allows you to show who are following your blog as well as the blogs you are following. Your Dashboard will you how many followers each of your blogs has. With a click on the Followers icon, you can browse your followers, see what blogs they write, and read the other blogs they’re following.

To adding the Followers gadget to your blog’s sidebar, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layout | Page Elements tab, click “Add a Gadget” and select “Followers” from the gadgets list. The Followers gadget shows the profile pictures of your followers and gives your readers a “Follow This Blog” link to join up, too.

Your followers can stay updated with your blog with the Reading List that we’ve added to the Blogger Dashboard. The Blogs I’m Following tab automatically shows the latest posts from all the blogs you follow. You can follow any blog from your reading list, even blogs that haven’t added the Followers widget or aren’t hosted on Blogger. Just click the “Add” button and type in the blog’s URL.

If you’re a Google Reader user, you’ll now see a special folder in Reader called “Blogs I’m Following,” full of the subscriptions for all of the blogs you follow. You can follow blogs you’ve subscribed to in Reader, too: From the Reading List on your Blogger Dashboard, click “Add,” then “Import from Google Reader.”

Next up for Google will be the integration of Google Friend Connect. The Following feature will be rolled out to all over the next few weeks, so if you don’t see it right away, don’t worry. It’s coming soon.

New feature: Reactions

After star ratings, Blogger now adds a new feature as a quick user poll widget: Reactions, which lets you define a set of attributes like “funny”, “interesting”, “cool”, or anything else. Then, your readers can upvote each of these attributes for each of your posts using a button. With this new Reactions feature, you can get one-click feedback from your readers.

To enable Reactions, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts gadget and then check the “Reactions” checkbox. You can edit the Reactions buttons by clicking "Edit" or clicking the buttons themselves, as shown.

You can customize the location of the Reactions within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box. We’ve found that it looks best when it’s on its own line, but your mileage may vary.

Additional Notes from Blogger in Draft team:

• This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Reactions.
• The buttons should blend seamlessly with most blog backgrounds. Button backgrounds are a mostly transparent grey which should, we hope, coordinate with everything. The text and button highlight colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
  • Foreground: textcolor, textColor, mainTextColor
    
  • Highlight: linkcolor, linkColor, mainLinkColor
    
• If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the reactions. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Reactions code from a fresh template. Search for “reactions-buttons” to find the appropriate block of code.
• A known issue: if you choose short words/phrases, it’s possible to enter enough options that the line of buttons will wrap (and not look very good). If this happens to you, you'll need to shorten your options or reduce their number.

Also, among other updates, Google changed the dashboard layout lately. If you have multiple blogs you can now click a “Hide” link for blogs you may want to access more rarely (a “Show all” link lets you view all blogs again, and allows you to toggle back the Hide settings if needed).

New Features for Blogger in Draft

There alot of cool features for Blogger blog that you might interest:

• 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, Blogger brought the comment form to your blog’s post pages, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.
• New post editor. Blogger has 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 so you need to login with your account there to try these features out. Please read the posts for each of the features before trying them so that you know what’s working and what isn’t.

Show off your favorite blogs with a Blog List

Blogger now released a new page element for Layouts blogs: Blog List that we had noiticed in "Add a Blogroll to Blogger". The Blog List improves on our Link List page element by using blogs’ RSS and Atom feeds to show update times, post titles, and snippets.

Use a Blog List to put a blogroll in your sidebar, or make a few to categorize the blogs you read. The Blog List works well for any page that has an RSS or Atom feed, so you can get creative: link to news sites, podcasts, Twitter streams, search results, or anything else with a feed.

Here’s a quick summary of the features that a Blog List gives you:

• Link to blogs, web pages, and feeds from your blog’s sidebar, with an optional favicon
  
• For pages with RSS and Atom feeds, Blog List can show last updated time, post title, and a snippet of the latest post
  
• Sort links alphabetically or by last update time
• Show all links, or hide some behind a “show all” link
  
• Import subscriptions from Google Reader
  
• Blog List links are visible to search engine crawlers, so your blog’s PageRank and reputation flow to those you link to

Here's a help video from Blogger Help Team to help you adding and configuring a Blog List:

Posting through iGoogle

Blogger in Draft annouced that they launching a draft version of the Blogger Posting Gadget for iGoogle. With this gadget, you can write, save, and publish posts to any of your Blogger blogs directly from iGoogle.

Interested? Try it now:

Make sure you’re signed in with the same Google account you use on Blogger in order to start posting.

Currently, the gadget supports the following:

• Editing the HTML of title, body and labels
• A drop-down menu to select from multiple blogs (if you have them)
• The ability to publish a post immediately, or save it back to Blogger as a draft post
  

Tip: If you start writing a post in HTML and decide that you want image uploading or other rich text features, just click “Save Draft.” The gadget will save the post, then give you a link to directly edit the post in Blogger.

Some compatibility notes Blogger in Draft:

• The Blogger posting gadget will only work in iGoogle, not in other gadget containers, because it requires authenticating with your google.com cookie. We hope to remove this restriction in the future.
• Since this gadget uses the JavaScript Google Data API for Blogger, it does not work in Apple’s Safari browser. We hope to fix this in the future as well.
• We’re also hearing reports that the gadget is not working correctly in Internet Explorer. We’re looking into this.
  

New Dashboard in Blogger blog

To see this feauture, just login with your account at Blogger in draft.

"The new dashboard contains all of the same information that the old one did, but rearranged to emphasize the most important content and changes (and with a little more room for future goodness). By default, only some of your blogs are shown in the dashboard, although there’s a link you can click to display all of them. The blogs we show by default include the two blogs you most recently published to, as well as any with unmoderated comments or ToS/spam warnings." Blogger in Draft

Unlink - A three-column template without images

Unlink - A nice three-column template without images designed by Free CSS Templates.
Blog to preview Daily Celebrity Pics.
Download: Unlink.xml

How to show AdSense between your posts?

To show ads between your posts first go to your Template | Page Elements tab. Then, in the "Blog Posts" section, click on "Edit". A pop-up window will appear with options to configure your blog posts. Check the box next to "Show Ads Between Posts". (Note: You must be signed up for AdSense before you can check this box.)
Show Ads Between Posts


Once you check this box you'll see the configuration options for your ads. You can then select how often you would like ads to be shown after your posts.
Show after every x posts


For example, if you want ads to be displayed after every post, select "1" from the drop-down menu. (Please note that AdSense policies limits you to a total of 3 ad units per page and Blogger will automatically prevent you from going over this limit.) You can then select your ad format and colors. Once you have finished configuring your ads, click on the orange "Save Changes" button in the bottom right corner.

Magazine Style Drop Caps

Dropcaps like in a fancy magazine is what you see in this post. If you like this tip, just follow this guide step by step.

Login to your Dashboard | Layout then choose Edit HTML and paste the code below to your CSS-definitions between the HEAD tag.

.dropcaps { float:left; color: $headerBgColor; font-size:100px; line-height:80px; padding-top:1px; padding-right:5px; }

Now in every of your posts, you need to put the fisrt letter between the tag SPAN like this: <span class="dropcaps">D</span> The result is very nice: a large capital that stretches over 5 lines.

Remember that you can change the font size bigger or smaller or setting the color in different if you want.

Hacks from Beautiful Beta via Mandarin Design

How to put AdSense on your Blogger blog

Easy AdSense for Your Blog

Blogger provides a simple way for you to make money with your blog. AdSense is Google's content-targeted advertising program. This means that you do not select keywords or categories for your ads. Instead, Google's servers determine what your posts are about and display the most relevant ads to your readers. So, if you blog about baseball, there might be ads for Major League Baseball memorabilia next to your post. If you blog about painting, there might be ads for art supplies.

Putting AdSense on Your Blog

This integration between AdSense and Blogger is intended to make it easier for you to get up and running with AdSense on your blog. To place AdSense on your blog quickly and easily, please follow the guide from Blogger Help here:

First of all, choose the blog that you want to put AdSense on, and go to the Template | Page Elements tab. You can get there by clicking the "Layout" link on the dashboard, or clicking the "Template" tab from the posting or settings page of the blog.


Once you're there, click on one of the "Add a Page Element" links. Choose the one that corresponds to the area of the page that you want to contain your AdSense ads. The "Choose a New Page Element" window comes up, from which you can select the AdSense option.


The next page you see will have an AdSense sign up page. If you're new to AdSense, go ahead and fill it out to create an account. If you already have an AdSense account, click the "sign in" link instead so you don't accidentally make an extra account.


Once you've signed in or created or account, you'll get the configuration screen. Use the menus to select a format, and one of our preset color templates. If you want more control, you can also enter colors of your own choosing by typing the hex codes in the spaces provided.


If for any reason you need to switch to using a different AdSense account, click on the "Switch to a different publisher ID" link at the bottom.

When you have things the way you want them, just save your changes and go see how it looks on your blog. Come back to tinker with the settings any time by clicking the "edit" link for the AdSense unit on the Page Elements tab.