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For all you visual learners who want to add features to your blog, but don't have the patience to browse our help articles, we've created the new Blogger Help YouTube Channel. There you can find videos that show you step by step how to use Blogger features.




There are only a few videos at the moment, and we've decided to start with the basics:

In the coming months we'll be adding more videos. If you have a suggestion for a video you'd like to see, let us know by posting in our Help Group. In addition, you can give us feedback on each video's comment form. We're always trying to find new and better ways to help you use Blogger and we appreciate the feedback - thanks!

Going to be in Austin for this year’s South by Southwest festival? That makes several of us!

Blogger is once again rocking it out at Club de Ville [map] with delicious snacks, an open bar, Blogger Play, and our SXSW staple: climate-inappropriate schwag.

The party starts at 9:30PM this Sunday and goes until 2AM on Monday.

You’ll need an invitation to get in the door. Members of the Blogger team will be at the Interactive conference, so just stop anyone you see wearing a Blogger logo and ask. If it’s one of us, you’ll get an invitation. If it’s someone else, you’ll still make a new Blogger-loving friend.

Want more drinking on Google’s dime? Come to these parties:

Google Party
Light Bar [map]
Saturday, 6PM–8PM
(This would be a pretty sure place to find invitations to the Blogger party as well.)

OpenSocial OpenBar
McCormick & Schmick’s (back room) [map]
Monday, 6PM–8PM

See you there!

With GrandCentral, a free service from Google, you can receive phone calls and post voicemails right on your blog. Though GrandCentral is currently in a private beta test, bloggers can skip the wait and get a free account immediately. Sign up now

WebCall Button
When you add GrandCentral’s WebCall button to your blog, your readers can easily call your phone or leave voicemails without ever seeing your telephone number.

You can screen calls, either accepting them or sending them to voicemail, and you can even block unwanted callers altogether. Learn how to add a WebCall button to your blog, and try it out for yourself below:


Voicemail Inbox


Your voicemail is all kept in a visual online inbox that is easy to manage. Store as many as you like for as long as you like, or post them to your blog so anyone can hear them. Here’s what it looks like to put a voicemail on your blog:


Sign Up Now
Ready to get started? Follow these links:
  1. Sign up for GrandCentral for free
  2. Add a WebCall button to your sidebar
  3. Post your voicemails to your blog

I'm saddened to have to do this yet again, but today we're saying our collective goodbyes to Graham Waldon, one of the longest-serving members of the Blogger team at Google. I was fortunate enough to have interviewed Graham before he joined us back in 2003, and after a few minutes of chatting I immediately knew he was our guy.

Over the years Graham’s provided amazingly patient and exemplary service to Blogger’s users, and set an impossibly high bar with his work — from constantly improving Blogger’s Help site, to personally answering countless help emails, to digging up fantastic Blogs of Note, to training new members of the Support team. He’s even moonlighted a bit, helping the Reader team with their support efforts!

Best of luck, Graham — it looks like you’ll be keeping plenty busy during the coming months, but be sure to swing by for lunch every now and then. ;)

- Eric and the rest of the Blogger team

This is a quick post to announce that, in addition to Blogger’s recent improvements and fixes, we are now available in Filipino.

There is already a very strong blogging community in the Philippines, and we’re very happy to support that and be a part of it. Want a taste? Start with our friend Aileen and keep clicking!

Today’s release brings a number of updates to Blogger:
  • Clearer identity options on the comment form, which now highlights some of the more popular OpenID providers more obviously.
  • Transliteration is now available in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu as well as Hindi
  • Posts with more than 200 comments have them split across multiple pages.
  • Layouts blogs now have a “Layouts” tab instead of “Template.”
We also made fixes to address bugs and other problems, including:
  • Better Persian translations and other BiDi layout fixes
  • A fix to the long-standing incorrect label counts bug
  • Safari 3 support for the Layouts template editor pages
  • Faster loading times for the post editor
  • Improved international support in the post editor’s date and time fields
  • Compatibility fixes for Picasa’s BlogThis! button
Nevertheless, there are two new issues that you should know about:
(Curious about other problems? Browse and vote at the Known Issues blog.)

Update, 8:30PM: Added new transliteration languages to features list
Update, 12:30PM: Fixed embarrassing typo in this post’s title. (Thx, Kamilia!)

We are excited to announce that Blogger is now available in three more languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian!

Blogger in Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian
Supporting these languages is a huge milestone for us because — unlike the other 37 languages Blogger is translated into — Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew are written from right to left. As you can see from the above screenshot, we had to flip the whole interface around.

Besides localizing the Blogger interface into these three languages, we have right-to-left templates and have added new toolbar buttons for bi-directional text editing in the post editor.

The effort was worth it, however, and we’re tremendously happy to be a part of the growing Arabic-, Hebrew-, and Persian-language blogging communities.

Changing your language preferences and settings
To see the Blogger interface in one of these languages, just use the menu on your Dashboard. You can also choose your language on Blogger’s homepage and via the “Language” link in the footer of most pages.

From then on, all new blogs you create will default to using your new language choice.

If you need to change the language of an existing blog, just go to Settings > Formatting and select a new language there. Your blog language affects date formatting and other blog text, and, with today’s release of Blogger, your blog’s comments form as well.

Right-to-left templates
For Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew blogs, we will also rearrange your template to read more logically from right to left. So, a blog that once looked like this:


will now look like this:


Please note that your template won’t change if you’ve customized it with Edit HTML; we wouldn’t dare muck with your data! Also, if you’re still using a Classic template you will have to upgrade to Layouts in order to take advantage of bidirectional language templates. Learn how.

Bidirectional text editing
We’ve also added right-to-left and left-to-right buttons to Blogger’s post editor. They’ll appear if your Dashboard language or your blog’s language setting is for a right-to-left language.
Clicking on these buttons will set the paragraph you are currently editing to either right-to-left or left-to-right mode. This way you can write truly bidirectional posts.

Happy rtl-blogging!

2007 has been Blogger's most amazing year yet! As you'll remember, we began it just after we had taken the new version of Blogger out of beta. Here's a quick run-down of many of the fun things we did since then:
If you're not using any of these on your blog, click through to the various Buzz posts and Help articles that explain them, and check them out — they're really nifty. And many thanks for sticking with Blogger through the transition to the new version earlier this year — it's a powerful and scalable platform on which we'll be building lots of exciting new features in 2008!

Two fixes just went live, before we sign off for a brief holiday break:
  • Unregistered commenters can once again provide an auto-linked URL [Help Group Thread]
  • Images in the Header page element will no longer be cropped vertically [Help Group thread]
We apologize for having broken these features for you. Your blogs and Help Group posts showed us the true extent to which you used and cared about these features, so please let us know if they're still being problematic.

Thanks for your patience!

After just two short weeks of testing on Blogger in draft, OpenID commenting is now available for all Blogger blogs. This means that your friends and readers can leave authenticated comments on your blog using their blog URLs from OpenID-enabled services such as WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals, or with their AOL/AIM accounts.


We've chosen a few popular OpenID providers to highlight on the comments form, but OpenID is, well, "open"! You can use any OpenID service to post a comment by choosing "Any OpenID" and filling in your OpenID URL.

You'll see the OpenID icon (OpenID icon) next to the names of commenters who posted with their OpenID. This icon assures you that the person who posted the comment is the same person blogging at the URL their name links to. Say goodbye to comment spoofing!

Turning on OpenID commenting on your blog

If you've set your "Who Can Comment?" setting to "Anyone," OpenID will be enabled on your comments pages right now! To change your comments settings, go to your blog's Settings | Comments tab in Blogger, and select "Registered Users" or "Anyone" in the Who Can Comment setting:


Getting an OpenID URL for your site

Blogger provides helpful shortcuts to WordPress.com, LiveJournal, TypeKey, and AOL, but you can use any URL that you control as your OpenID URL by using delegation.

For example, say you have a LiveJournal account with the username "brad." This gives you an OpenID URL at http://www.livejournal.com/users/brad/. You could comment with this URL, but you'd rather have your comments link to your homepage at http://bradfitz.com/.

By copying two lines of HTML into the <head> tag of http://bradfitz.com/, you can turn it into an OpenID URL. Then, you can use http://bradfitz.com/ to sign your comments, while logging in to LiveJournal when you do so.

Delegation gives you complete control over what URL you use to represent yourself online, and complete control over what service you want to use to login with. Sam Ruby wrote a great article about OpenID delegation that we recommend if you're interested.

LiveJournal, AOL, WordPress.com, and TypeKey aren't the only OpenID providers out there. If you need an OpenID account, you can also get one from myOpenID, Verisign, or any other service that implements OpenID.

The "Other" URL field

Right now, the only way to add a URL to your name when commenting is to sign your comment with OpenID. We apologize for removing the URL field from the comments form prematurely two weeks ago. That was a mistake on our part that came from launching OpenID support on Blogger in draft.

Ironically, our testing of OpenID, a feature that lets you use accounts from all over the web to comment on Blogger, made it appear that we were trying to force you into getting a Google Account. We regret this appearance, since we're strong supporters of OpenID and open web standards in general.

If you haven't set up OpenID, you can still link to your blog — or any webpage, for that matter — by using the standard <a> tag inside the comment form.