Updates and Bug Fixes

Today’s Blogger release is a big one for Blogger . Let’s lead off with the quick stuff:

• Google Gadget integration continues to improve, with better editing of gadget preferences.


• The new look for the Dashboard has seen a handful of tweaks, including a new button style that we’re trying out and, by popular demand, the “show all blogs” toggle is now sticky.


• The subscribe page element has been published to WWW.


• We’ve added a “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” to the Blogger in Draft dashboard, so now you don’t have to remember to type “draft.blogger.com” instead of “www.blogger.com.”


• So you can easily keep up with the news, we’ve added this blog as a tab on the Blogger in Draft Dashboard.

But that’s not what you came here for. You wanted this:

• 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, we’ve brought the comment form to your blog’s post pages, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.


• New post editor. We’ve 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 because we’re not done with them and we’re looking for your feedback. Please read the posts for each of the features before trying them so that you know what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure you leave comments! These are big features for us, so we want to get them right before we turn them on for everyone.