Blogger updated the dialog that lets you insert photos. Now it uses horizontal tabs, just like in Gmail. You can upload photos, add photos from Picasa Web Albums/Google+ Photos, capture photos from your webcam or paste URLs. Blogger's dialog has special sections that restrict Google+ Photos to images from your blog or from your phone (Auto Backup).


When you select "from your phone", you can rotate photos or even delete them:


It's interesting that Blogger still uses Picasa Web Albums instead of Google+ Photos, while also including a feature that's only available if you use Google+: Auto Backup.

Blogger, Gmail and other Google services use the same Google Drive picker and customize it  by adding a long list of parameters.

For some reason, Google doesn't make it easy to automatically post content to Google+. You can't add the URL of a feed and import the posts from a blog. There's an exception: Blogger.

If you've integrated Blogger with Google+, you probably noticed a Google+ sharing box after publishing a post. It only required one click to share the post on Google+.


Now you can get even lazier: enable "Automatically share after posting" in Blogger's Google+ section and your posts will be shared automatically.


Google says that "automatic sharing to Google+ is enabled by default on all public blogs linked to Google+ pages or profiles. When you publish a blog post, a snippet of the post will automatically be shared publicly on your Google+ page or profile." That's probably true for new blogs, but it wasn't true for my blog: I had to manually enable "Automatically share after posting".

You can still enable "Prompt to share after posting" if you like to see the Google+ sharing box. Disable both options if you don't want to share your posts on Google+. Blogger also adds "share" links next to "edit", "view" and "delete" and you can use this feature to manually share posts on Google+.

Update: This feature is buggy. Here's what I got after publishing this post:


{ via Blogger Buzz }

I don't like to use this blog to report bugs, but sometimes it's important to do that. Blogger no longer shows the old comments imported from the native commenting system. I've switched to Google+ comments and all the comments were properly imported. Now the legacy comments are no longer displayed.

Here's an old post that has 218 comments, but none are displayed:


Disabling Google+ comments fixes this issue, but the comments powered by Google+ are missing. This means that the old comments aren't lost, but there's a bug in the Google+ commenting system.

I checked the Blogger help forum before posting this and I was surprised to see some top contributors claiming that "all the non-Google+ comments disappear when you switch to Google+ comments". I'll link to the official Blogger blog: "older comments will continue to appear in the new widget".

Update (a few hours later): Google fixed the bug, but there's another one. I can't post a new comment and clicking "reply" doesn't have any visible effect. I've seen similar reports in the Blogger help forum.

Update 2: Google acknowledged the second issue and promised to fix it.

Update 3: Apparently, blog owners were the only ones that couldn't post, but this was fixed. Thanks, Yonatan Zunger.

{ Thanks, Kristian. }

I don't know about you, but I like to write the title of the post at the end. It makes sense to pick a title only after writing an article because the title usually summarizes the text. Sometimes I have no idea what's the right title, but it reveals itself after writing the last paragraph.

This post is not about finding the right title for a blog post, it's about a new Blogger feature (or a bug?) that shows this message as soon as you start writing a post: "Required field must not be blank". The warning is placed below the title field, but it's not obvious that it refers to the title. Click "ignore warning" and the warning is displayed again in a few seconds.

You can't save, preview or publish post if you haven't picked a title. This is really dangerous: what happens if you write a long post and the browser crashes? Until now, Blogger automatically saved the post as a draft and you could find it later. Now it's no longer saved until you write a title.


You could write a temporary title and change it later, but why use a workaround? The title should not be a required field. Blogger could show a warning before publishing the post and that should be enough. It's important to mention that Blogger has never required post titles before. You could even publish posts without a title.

To sum up: here's a feature that's annoying, not useful, dangerous and hard to understand. It's really difficult to come up with something like this, but someone did.


What if Gmail had a similar feature?


Update (July 8th): The feature has been removed (or the bug has been fixed).

{ Thanks, Beben. }

While Blogger's new commenting system has a lot of cool features, there's an important downside: Google+ Comments has nothing to do with Blogger.

The old comments are available in the new interface, but the new comments are not available in the old commenting system, if you decide to switch back. Blogger's comment feeds don't include the comments from the new interface, you can no longer manage comments from the Blogger dashboard and the new comments aren't included when you export your blog.

Here's the empty comment feed for a post that has a lot of comments:


When you switch to Google+ Comments, you outsource the comments to Google+, but Google+ doesn't have a section that lets you manage the comments and there's no way to export the new comments.

I don't know if you've notice, but this blog's comments look different. That's because I've switched to the new Google+ Comments feature for Blogger.


The upgraded commenting system preserves the existing comments, but the future comments require a Google+ account. That means, visitors can no longer post comments anonymously, using an OpenID account or using a Google account that hasn't been upgraded to Google+. When posting a comment, visitors can also share it on Google+. The new commenting system doesn't just show the comments posted on Blogger, it also shows all the Google+ messages that link to the post and their comments.

Just like Disqus, Google+ Comments shows by default the best comments and there's an option to show the most recent comments. It's not clear how Google determines the top comments, but the number of +1s could be one of the signals. You can also restrict the comments to the people from your Google+ circles.

Bloggers will notice some other changes: the comment management feature from Blogger is no longer available and you can only manage comments for each post. That's a significant downside, especially if you receive a lot of comments. When one of your posts receive new comments, you'll see a notification in the Google bar and you'll get an email notification. I haven't found a way to disable these notifications, not even from the Google+ settings page.

How to enable Google+ Comments if you have a Blogger blog? "Google+ Comments is available for Blogger users who have created a Google+ profile and connected it with their blog. If you haven't upgraded your Blogger profile to a Google+ profile and would like to, you can start the process by clicking the Google+ tab on the Blogger dashboard. Once your blogs are linked to a Google+ profile, a new 'Use Google+ Comments' setting will be displayed on the Google+ tab of your blog," explains Google. If your blog has a heavily modified template, you may need to reset widgets or use the code from this page.

There are additional limitations: Google+ Comments is not available for private blogs and for blogs with adult content. This means that the old commenting system will continue to be available as long as Blogger supports these kinds of blogs. You can always disable Google+ Comments and go back to the legacy Blogger commenting system.

It's important to point out that Google+ Comments are embedded as an iframe (the URL starts with https://plusone.google.com/_/widget/render/comments) and the comments are no longer included inside the Blogger page. Google manages to index content from iframes, but the change could affect your Google rankings.

Another interesting thing: it's the first time when the official Google Blog has comments.

Some early thoughts:

* Blogger is now more relevant, it's less likely that it will be discontinued in the next few years

* Blogger finally has a modern commenting system

* Google+ Comments will be available for other blogging platforms

* "sign in with Google+" will make Google+ even more popular as an identity service.

Until now, Blogger automatically generated the URL of a post using the first words from the title. If you want to customize the URL, there's a new "permalink" option in the "post settings" sidebar. When you create a post, click "permalink", enable "custom URL" and type the file name. You can only customize the file name (it's highlighted in the following example):

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/07/custom-blogger-url.html

... and you can only use alphanumeric characters, underscore, dash and period.


It's important to note that you can choose a custom URL only when you create a post and you can't change it later.

Why use this feature? Create shorter permalinks, use different keywords in the URL, improve search rankings. "A site's URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans," suggests Google.

As a side note, there's a mistake in the help center page for this feature: "Because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog." That used to be a major annoyance in the pre-2006 Blogger, but it's no longer the case today.

Blogger blogs are no longer that limited. After adding support for static pages and favicons, Blogger added some new advanced features to the "search preferences" section of the settings page.

Now you can edit the description meta tag without editing the template. If you edit the description meta tag for the entire blog, you can also write descriptions for your blog posts. This is useful because Google's snippets sometimes rely on this meta tag.

For the first time you can create a custom 404 error page for a Blogger blog without buying a domain. Just "enter an HTML message that will be displayed on the Page Not Found page instead of the generic message." Google has some tips for creating useful 404 pages and there's even a widget powered by Google search that shows related links and a search box with appropriate search suggestions.

You can also create custom redirects, but only for internal URLs. For example, you can redirect http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/mailto to http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/02/open-mailto-links-using-gmail-in-google.html. Make sure that you leave out the first part of the URL (http://googlesystem.blogspot.com) when you create the redirect.

There are also options for customizing the robots.txt page and robots header tags. It's probably a good idea to use Blogger's robots.txt page as a template (http://yourblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt) and only add some new pages you want to be ignored by search engines.

Google found an interesting trick to defend Blogger blogs against local laws: redirect readers to country-specific domains and only remove those URLs if required.

"Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or 'ccTLD.' For example, if you're in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader's current location," explains Google.

"Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD." That means [blogname].blogspot.com will continue to exist, but it's not clear if the users from that specific country will still be able to access it.

Blogger will start to use country-specific domains, just like many other Google services. If you're in Australia and visit google.com, you'll be redirected to google.com.au, but you can opt-out by clicking "Go to Google.com" or visiting google.com/ncr. The same option is available for Blogger: "Blog readers may request a specific country version of the blogspot content by entering a specially formatted NCR URL. NCR stands for 'No Country Redirect' and will always display [blogname].blogger.com in English, whether you're in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere. For example: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr – always goes to the U.S. English blog."

Google doesn't mention the list of countries that are affected by this change, but Techdows.com reports that India is one of them. Obviously, blog owners can use custom domains if they don't like the new feature. Even if Google made sure that the duplicate URLs are properly handled by search engines, it could be annoying to see so many URLs that send people to the same page.

{ Thanks, Venkat and Herin. }

Blogger's comment system has been updated and it now supports threading. You can now reply to a comment and read the entire conversation. "It is now much easier to differentiate between whether someone is making a general comment on the thread, or responding to another comment on the thread," informs Google.

The threaded view is only available for embedded comments and it requires to enable full-text blog feeds.


If you've manually customized your blog's template, you may not see the new feature. One way to solve this issue is to reset widgets. In the new Blogger interface, go to the Template tab, click "Backup/Restore" and download your template, then click "Edit HTML", "Proceed" and "Revert widget templates to default". If something doesn't look right, you can always go back to the old template by clicking "Backup / Restore" and uploading the template you've saved.

When you edit your Blogger profile, Blogger shows a message at the top of the page that says: "Connect Blogger to Google+: Use your Google profile and get access to upcoming Google+ features on Blogger". Unfortunately, the links seem to be broken, but both URLs reference profile switching.


It's obvious that Blogger profiles will be discontinued and replaced by Google Profiles, but it's not clear how Blogger will integrate with Google+. Maybe Blogger posts will automatically trigger Google+ posts and Blogger/Google+ comments will be synchronized. Friend Connect will be discontinued and Google+ could replace it. Friend Connect's goal was to "help site owners easily provide social features for their visitors. Users gain the ability to sign in to, make friends on, and interact with your site, making it more social and more dynamic". It wasn't successful, but Google+ has a better chance to make Blogger more social.

Update: Blogger's blog informs that this option is available if you use Blogger in Draft and it will be released in the regular Blogger interface in the coming weeks. For now, the only changes are that the Blogger profile redirects to the Google profile, the author's name is now obtained from Google Profiles and Google's snippets for the blog posts include information about authors: name, thumbnail and link to the profile. "If you blog under a pseudonym and do not want your blog to be associated with your real name, you should not migrate from a Blogger profile to a Google+ profile," suggests Google. If you change your mind after switching to the Google+ profile, you can revert to the Blogger profile.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

If you don't like Blogger's Dynamic Views, but your favorite blog enabled one of them, there's a way to go back to the previous template: just add &v=0 to the URL. For example, here's the URL for Gmail's blog: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/?v=0.

Unfortunately, the change is not persistent and you need to add the parameter every time you visit the homepage or one of the posts. You can also bookmark the URL.

Last month, Blogger's team launched a Lightbox-like feature which was quickly removed after users started to complain. Blogger's Lightbox was automatically enabled for all the images from a post and blog owners couldn't disable it.

The feature is now back, it's still enabled by default, but you can disable it from Settings > Formatting by selecting "No" next to "Open images in Lightbox". If you use Blogger's new interface, the setting can be found in the "Post and comments" section. As Google explains, "If Yes is selected, when a reader clicks on an image in a post, it will be displayed in a slideshow-like overlay instead of leaving your page and navigating to the image."

The old interface:


The new interface:


{ via Blogger Buzz. Thanks, Petros. }

Blogger launched in March five blog views that used cutting-edge technologies to transform a blog into a Web app. Back then, visitors had to enter a special URL like gmailblog.blogspot.com/view/sidebar or install a Chrome extension to switch to one of the new interfaces. Six months later, Blogger created two new views (classic and magazine) and added the list of dynamic views to Blogger's template editing section so that blog authors can replace their template with one of the seven views that are now available.


There are three kinds of dynamic views: photo-oriented templates (flipcard, mosaic, snapshot), text-oriented templates (classic, sidebar) and magazine-like templates (magazine, timeslide). If you don't have a photoblog, classic, sidebar and magazine are the best dynamic views for your blog. Blogger's new templates bring a lot cool features and change the way readers interact with a blog. Infinite scrolling replaces pagination, blog posts are loaded using AJAX, Blogger caches blog posts so they load faster, images are downloaded as you browse, you can use keyboard shortcuts (j/k or n/p) to go to the next or previous post just like in Google Reader. There's also instant search that shows the list of results as you type.



While dynamic views have many cool features, there are also many downsides. They're not very customizable: you can only upload a header image and customize the background colors. When you pick one of the views, all the gadgets you've added will disappear. It's also annoying that blog posts no longer open in separate pages: they open either in lightbox-like panes or in a homepage-like interface, next to other posts (here's an example). Just like the mobile template, dynamic views only work with Blogger's commenting system, so you won't be able to use Disqus. It will be interesting to see how search engines handle the new templates, considering that blog posts are loaded using JavaScript and HTML pages are almost empty.

I don't intend to switch to one of the dynamic views, but my favorite templates are sidebar and magazine. You can always bookmark these links or use Google's Chrome extension, which needs to be updated to add support for the two new dynamic views. Some Google blogs have already switched to the new templates: Blogger Buzz, Gmail Blog, Google Docs Blog and LatLong.

Blogger added a feature that makes it easier to view multiple photos. When you click on an image from a Blogger post, a LightBox-like overlay shows a bigger version of the image and lets you view the other images in a slideshow. The feature was borrowed from Google+, it's enabled by default and can't be disabled from the settings page.

If you want to open an image in a new tab, middle-click on the URL displayed below the image or right-click the link and select "open link in new tab". The slideshow supports keyboard shortcuts: left/right arrows, j/k, n/p to navigate, Esc to close the slideshow.




{ Thanks, Petros and Cougar. }

Blogger has an app for iPhone and it's better than the corresponding Android app, which has improved a lot in the past months. Both apps let you edit your existing posts and create new posts, add images to your posts, include labels and geolocate your posts.

They're pretty basic, but the iPhone app has a better interface, it's easier to use and pays attention to detail. For example, the iPhone app includes the URL of the blog next to the name when you switch to a different blog, so that it's easier to identify a blog. The Android app only shows the names. To publish a post in the iPhone app, you need to tap the "Publish" button, which is always displayed at the top of the screen. In the Android app you need to scroll to the bottom of the post to find the "publish" button.



"With the Blogger app, you can write a new blog post and publish it immediately or save it as a draft right from your iOS device. You can also open a blog post you've been working on from your computer and continue editing it while you're on-the-go. Your blog posts are automatically synced across devices, so you’ll always have access to the latest version," informs Google.

Google promised a new Blogger interface back in March and started a limited test in April. "The new design is not only cleaner and more modern, but it also uses Google Web Toolkit, delivering the latest in web technology."

The new interface is now available in Blogger in Draft, but it looks quite different. "Over the last couple of months, we've made significant improvements to our new user interface. First and foremost, we've incorporated your feedback and made numerous fixes based on that feedback. Also, we've updated the look and feel of our new design, inspired by Google's newest design evolutions," explains Google. Blogger uses Ajax, so all the pages load a lot faster, including the post editor. Unfortunately, Blogger is still very slow when you perform a search and try to display posts or comments.


Blogger's new UI is cleaner and it offers additional information about your posts: the number of pageviews. Tabs have been replaced by a vertical menu and the list of labels is now a drop-down. The post editor is much better, especially if you use the default view. Blogger's new editor takes up most of the page and post settings are now included in a sidebar.


There's a lot of white space in the new interface, buttons aren't big enough to be readable and Blogger includes too much information that's not very useful: the total number of published comments and the total number of pageviews. The new interface is a mixed bag: it's modern, clean, faster and more powerful, but there are many things that need to be changed before replacing the existing interface.

You can try the new UI at draft.blogger.com and you also have the option to make it the default interface.

Mashable reports that Blogger and Picasa Web Albums could change their names and become Google Blogs and Google Photos. "Google intends to retire several non-Google name brands and rename them as Google products. The move is part of a larger effort to unify its brand for the public launch of Google+."

While Google Photos makes a lot sense, replacing Blogger with Google Blogs is not a great idea. When people say "Google Blogs", they refer to the long list of Google's corporate blogs. "Google Blogs" is already used for Google Blog Search, but only on the homepage.

On the other hand, Blogger could be redesigned and use interface elements from Google+, Blogger's profiles could be replaced by Google Profiles, the commenting system could be revamped and integrated with Google+.

One of the reasons why Picasa Web Albums didn't improve too much is that it has always been perceived as Picasa's online extension. It wasn't a standalone photo sharing service and many of its features required Picasa. You couldn't upload more than 5 photos, download albums or edit photos without installing Picasa. Google considered changing Picasa Web's name back in 2008.

Blogger added five dynamic templates that transform blogs into interactive apps. Just add /view to the URL of a blog that offers full feeds (for example: googlesystem.blogspot.com/view) and you'll be able to try the new views: flipcard, mosaic, sidebar, snapshot and timeline. Blogger's templates offer features like infinite scrolling, progressive image loading, smart search, filtering posts by date, author or label. "These new views use the latest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3," explains Google.




In the near future, bloggers will be able to customize the templates and use them without having to change the URL.

Google rarely preannounces new features, so I was really surprised to see a video that highlights some upcoming Blogger features. Google's video does a great job at enumerating the latest Blogger improvements, while asking people: "Have you looked at Blogger lately?".

Google plans to unveil a completely new Blogger interface, mobile templates for blogs (which are already available at Blogger in Draft) and a feature that lets you find related posts and videos.






Here's the video: