Blogger in Draft: Use Your Own Photo for Your Blog’s Background

Blogger in Draft: Use Your Own Photo for Your Blog’s Background: "By Wongoo Lee, Software Engineer After we launched the Blogger Template Designer , one of the most requested features was the ability to u..."

Customize Your Favicon
Filed under: favicon

Posted by Dongil Seo, Software Engineer



For many bloggers, having a custom favicon (the tiny image displayed in your browser’s window or tab) is the finishing touch that ties together the design and identity of a great looking blog. Today, we're pleased to announce that Blogger in Draft users can now add a customized favicon to their blog.

You can add a custom favicon from the Design | Page Elements tab (or, from the Layout tab if you're using the new user interface), by clicking Edit on the new “Favicon” setting above the navbar element:




A new window will then open where you can select an image from your hard drive to replace the default favicon image. This initial launch only supports .ico files, but you can easily convert your JPEG, PNG, or other non-ico image file using your own image software. There are also many conversion tools online, and a quick Google Search brings up a handful of options such as http://www.icoconverter.com/.




Once you’ve selected the .ico file for your favicon, click Save. We'll automatically resize the image to the correct dimensions, and you’ll then see the Page Elements updated with your selected favicon image:




When you save your template changes, you’ll see your newly-added favicon image displayed in your browser window or tab. That’s it!

In the future, we’ll add support for more non-ico image formats, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think.
Posted at 2:24 PM 226 comments Links to this post
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Reactions:
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Blogger, Redesigned
Filed under: Blogger, Blogger in Draft, redesign
Posted by Jinwoo Lee, Blogger tech lead

As we shared before, our team has been hard at work on a brand new, next generation design for Blogger. After doing a sneak preview at the South by Southwest conference back in March, we received some great feedback from the media:

* Half A Billion Blog Posts Later, Google To Give Blogger A Revamp
* Google’s Blogger Is About to Get an Overhaul


Today, we're thrilled to announce the public launch of our redesign! But please wait a second before you go check out your Blogger dashboard, because we’re planning a gradual rollout that will start with a limited set of users who visit our new feature testing ground, Blogger in Draft. At the start, only some of you (lucky draws!) can see the new design on Blogger in Draft. Over the course of the next few days and weeks we’ll be ramping up to support all Draft users. There is no sign-up or activation process required from your side; just wait, and you’ll notice your dashboard has changed to the new design when you log in to Blogger in Draft.

Although our team has been hard at work cranking out tons of new features over the last year or so, it’s been a while since our user interface has had a major update so we’re very excited about Blogger’s fresh new look. However, there’s much more to the redesign than shiny new graphics and pages—we’ve essentially rewritten the entire application from scratch, using the latest web technologies that will enable us to make future updates in more agile and flexible ways.

We decided to make the new UI available to our loyal Blogger users as quickly as possible. We realize there might be some ‘rough edges’ (see this page for the known issues) but fear not, we’ll be continually updating and improving the experience until it’s ready to graduate from Blogger in Draft. Our team is also very eager to hear your feedback, so please don’t hesitate to let us know of any bugs or suggestions by clicking on the “Send feedback” link in the navigation bar (or directly on this form).

This is only the beginning of many exciting updates that we’re planning for Blogger this year, so stay tuned!
Posted at 6:29 PM 297 comments Links to this post
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Reactions:
Friday, December 17, 2010
New mobile templates for reading on the go
Filed under: mobile
Posted by Jiho Han, Software Engineer

We know many of you like to view blog posts on your smartphones. However, it can be difficult at times because of the small screen size. This is why we are excited to announce our first launch of mobile templates! Initially available as opt-in functionality on Blogger in Draft, mobile templates will re-format your blogs for smartphones to enhance your readers’ viewing experience. In order to activate mobile templates, simply go to Dashboard > Settings > Email & Mobile tab, enable the mobile template option and then save settings.


Feature highlights

* Preview: Get a glimpse of what your blog will look like by clicking on the Mobile Preview button. You can also see it on your smartphone by scanning the QR-code to the right of the options.
* Automatic redirection: All opted-in blogs will automatically be redirected to the mobile view when accessed from a smartphone*.
* Template support: We are initially supporting 6 variants of the Simple template and 6 variants of the Awesome template. If you have used one of these 12 templates through our Template Designer, your mobile view will be rendered in the same style as your desktop view (other template variants will be rendered as Simple). Some gadgets are also supported**.



* Mobile ads: Mobile AdSense ads will be displayed at the top of the post pages and at the bottom of the index page if the blog has an AdSense gadget or inline blog ads.


* Comments and videos: You will be able to make comments and watch videos.

We hope you enjoy the improved mobile experience. As always, we would love to hear from you so please feel free to tell us what you think through our feedback form.

*WebKit-based mobile browsers are supported for our initial launch.
**Supported gadgets/elements in this launch: Header, Blog, Profile, AdSense, Attribution.
Posted at 9:47 AM 280 comments Links to this post
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Reactions:
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Search and Insert YouTube Videos
Filed under: Blogger, Youtube
Blogger supports drop-dead easy video-blogging -- if you have a video file, you can just upload it to Blogger. But when it comes to video-blogging, we know a lot of you also choose to embed YouTube videos to your post.

Currently, adding a YouTube video to your post is fairly easy, but it still requires several steps of work: If you don't have the embed code already, you'd have to open a new browser window or tab, go to YouTube.com, search the video, and play the video to make sure it's the right video. Once you copy the embed code, you come back to your Blogger post and manually insert the code in your post.

We’ve just added a new Blogger in Draft feature that makes this process a lot easier. You don't have to open another tab or window; from your post editor, just click the Insert a Video button in the toolbar. In addition to the already existing Upload tab, you'll now see two new tabs: From YouTube and My YouTube videos.



In the From YouTube tab, you can search, browse, and play back YouTube videos all within the interface. If you have your own videos on YouTube, My YouTube videos tab will show them as well.


Once you choose the video, click on Select to insert the video to the post. You’ll then see a thumbnail image for the video, which you can move around in the post by drag-and-drop.


By the way, in case you didn’t know, it’s as easy to add a video to your blog from YouTube as it is to add a YouTube video in Blogger. While you are watching a YouTube video, click “Share” button, and you will see Blogger as one of the places you can share the video to. Click on Blogger, and you’ll see the familiar BlogThis! mini post editor -- all you have to do is to select a blog (if you have more than one blog, that is), fill out some content, and then Publish the post. Enjoy video-blogging!



Posted at 11:41 AM 50 comments Links to this post
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Reactions:
Monday, November 22, 2010
More Fonts Means More Choice
Filed under: fonts, template designer
Posted by Wongoo Lee, Software Engineer

Self expression is a beautiful thing. It’s one of the best things about having a blog—a place where you can control the look and feel of your message and how it’s presented. Today we’re excited to announce another amazing way to make your blog truly you—Web Fonts.

The Web has traditionally been pretty limited when it comes to font selection, especially for non-Latin alphabets such as Cyrillic and Greek. But great strides have been made in this arena by our friends on the Google Web Fonts team, and finally there are more choices out there than just Arial and Times New Roman. In fact, there are now 40 new fonts on Blogger in Draft for you to choose from. And we’re just getting started—lots more to come!


Simply go into the Advanced tab of the Blogger Template Designer, select the type of text you’d like to change (Post Title, Page Text, etc.) and pick from a number of exciting, new fonts such as Reenie Beanie (which we've used for the title of this post!) or Neucha (Cyrillic) or GFS Didot (Greek) or even Hanuman (Khmer). You will be spoilt with choice! For the full list, please take a look at the Web Fonts page in our Help Center.

Give it a try, and as always, we’d love to hear your feedback. Just leave us a comment.
Posted at 10:00 PM 188 comments Links to this post
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Reactions:
Monday, August 30, 2010
New Stats Gadgets
Posted by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer

Update, 9/29:
Based upon your feedback, we've added two gadget options:

1. In the Popular Post gadget, you can now choose the number of posts you want the gadget to display
2. In the Blog's Stats gadget, we've added an option to let you choose the time window of your pageview counts (All Time, Last 30 days, Last 7 days)

---
After we launched the Blogger Stats to Blogger in Draft, we’ve made some improvements based on your feedback. (See the updates on our original blog post for the list of changes.) Additionally, we’ve created two new gadgets that you can add to your blog to show your readers interesting stats from your blog: Blog’s stats and Popular Posts gadgets.

The data for these gadgets is automatically taken from Blogger Stats. To use them, go to Design | Page Elements, and click on “Add a gadget.”



The Blog’s stats gadget displays total pageviews* of your blog. The gadget comes in different styles and also features an optional sparkline graph.
(* The pageviews are counted from when we rolled out the Stats feature, not from the first day your blog was created.)



The Popular Posts gadget helps your readers quickly find out which of your posts have been viewed the most by your readers. The gadget also comes with several different styles and configurations.


The new Stats gadgets are available now on Blogger in Draft, so you can go ahead and give them a try now. For any bugs, questions, or suggestions, please send them our way through the comments to this post or our Blogger Help forum.

Posted at 9:16 PM 143 comments Links to this post
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Reactions:
Friday, July 30, 2010
Use Your Own Photo for Your Blog’s Background
Filed under: blog background image
By Wongoo Lee, Software Engineer

After we launched the Blogger Template Designer, one of the most requested features was the ability to upload your own background image. Though we provide hundreds of professional stock photos from iStockPhoto, we know many of you are serious photo buffs and would like to use your own beautiful photo as your blog’s background image.

And now you can! Go to Design | Template Designer | Background, click on Background Image, and you’ll notice a new “Upload image” option, which will allow you to select and upload your image.


For images that fill the entire background, we recommend using a resolution of 1800 pixels wide and 1600 pixels high, and file size less than 200KB to minimize the loading time of your blog pages. We support JPEG, GIF, and PNG format images.

After uploading a photo, you will see additional options that are not available for the built-in images: Alignment, Repeat, and Scroll options.


* Alignment: You can adjust horizontal (left, center, right) and vertical (top and bottom) alignment of your background image.
* Repeat (Tile): If you have a small image, you can have it repeat horizontally and/or vertically to fill the page. Otherwise, we recommend that you choose a page background color that blends in with your background image.
* Scroll: By default, your image stays in place while readers scroll the page contents. By selecting the “Scroll with page” option, both the background image and page contents scroll together. We recommend that you use an image that blends into your background color or set your image to tile vertically if you choose this option.


This feature is available on Blogger in Draft right now, so please go ahead and check it out! As always, thanks for using Blogger in Draft. We will welcome your comments, and if you have any questions, please send them our way through the Blogger Help forum.