Learn how to add an image to your blog's header

Our friend Ryanne has been asking us for an easy way to add an image to her blog’s header for a few months now. When we added the feature a few weeks back, she was excited enough to create a screencast to teach everyone how to do it:


Also, a plug: Blogger is sponsoring Pixelodeon, a vlogging conference Ryanne is co-organizing, happening June 9th and 10th in Los Angeles, CA. A few of us from Blogger will be attending - go there!

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Test Blogger and We’ll Love You and Pay You

You can help us out and make money just by using Blogger! From time to time at Blogger we run usability studies to make sure that we’re on the right track with all the new features we’re working on.

If playing with Blogger for an hour or so and making up to $100 sounds like something you’d like to do, please sign up here. Have more questions? Read the FAQ. You don’t even have to live near Mountain View, CA to participate.

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Auto-savory Blogger Posting

Today we're adding autosaving of draft posts to the Blogger post editor. Now you don't have to feel so bad about browser crashes, random laptop restarts, or that hamster vs. gerbil war going on behind your desk that keeps knocking your power cord out of the socket, because Blogger is automatically saving as you type! It's doing it to me right now. Even if I...

*smash*

Whoops! I just pretended that my browser crashed for the purpose of illustrating that the above paragraph is still intact, thanks to autosave! So say "goodbye" to lost blog posts. You won't miss them.

As you work on a new or draft post in the Blogger post editor, the page will periodically send a copy of the text, title, labels, etc. to our servers. We do this about once a minute, unless you type a lot, in which case we'll save as soon as you stop typing, just to be on the safe side. You'll know it's happening because the "Save Now" button at the bottom of the page will turn into a gray "Saved" button.

We'll autosave new posts (they'll become drafts) as well as draft posts that you edit. We won't autosave posts that are currently published, since you don't want your readers to see your updates while you're working on them.

On top of this, we're revamping the post editor's keyboard shortcuts to make them a bit more sane. Now Ctrl-P publishes, Ctrl-S saves a draft, and Ctrl-D switches from published to draft. We moved Preview over to Ctrl-Shift-P.

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Web Programmer? Come work on Blogger!

Now that Blogger's on fresh, solid ground, our engineering team is cranking full-steam ahead on lots of exciting new features! But we've got a classic problem that comes with growth - there's too much to do, and too few people to do it all.

Therefore, we're looking to hire some UI experts (both visual and interaction designers, as well as software engineers) to join the Blogger Team here at Google, and help us plan and build Blogger's next generation features. If you're interested, send an email to jobs@blogger.com with your resumé, and which of the following job descriptions you're interested in:

• Visual Designer
• Interaction Designer
• User Interface Software Engineer
  

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Blogger Developer Guide Update

Anyone interested in hacking on Blogger's API should check out the freshly-updated Blogger Data API Developer Guide. It has sections covering development in several of the available client libraries, including Java, .NET and Python. For questions and discussion related to API development, head over to the bloggerDev list.

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Blog*Stars 2.0

Last fall, Jordan introduced us all to our first Blog*Stars: those members of our Blogger Help Group who deserve special recognition for their contributions and their dedication to helping their fellow bloggers. Our original four are all still going strong, and now we're also pleased to announce the newest members to join their ranks. Congratulations to Panther, Sr. Mina, Miskaop, and Bonnie Calhoun! Keep shining, Blog*Stars!

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Old Blogger is dead! Long live Blogger!

Today at Blogger HQ we accomplished one of our most significant milestones ever: we changed old Blogger’s monitoring from “page us when it goes down” to “page us if it comes back to life in a horrifying, zombie state.”

Most of you probably haven’t noticed, since you’ve been happily (we hope) using new Blogger for several weeks or months now. But we’re excited to be done with it, since now we can focus 100% on the new Blogger and all we want to add to it.

While old Blogger totters off to realize its dream of getting to level 70 in the Burning Crusade, let’s take some time to remember what it took to replace the old Blogger with the new.

14 August 2006: The new version of Blogger launches as a public beta
23 August 2006: Blogger’s 7th birthday
30 August 2006: Edit HTML added to beta’s Layouts
2 September 2006: Login box fiasco solved
5 September 2006: Beta Known Issues blog launched
21 September 2006: Mobile posting added
4 October 2006: Picasa support added
26 October 2006: Week of Old Blogger meltdowns
2 November 2006: Beta declared “feature complete” with FTP support
10 November 2006: All new accounts created on Blogger in beta
12 November 2006: New mobile accounts created on Blogger in beta
11 December 2006: Team blogs allowed to switch to Blogger in beta
19 December 2006: New Blogger taken out of beta
4 January 2007: BlogThis! added
24 January 2007: Percentage of users required to switch to new Blogger
15 February 2007: All users required to switch to new Blogger on login
21 February 2007: FTP publishing reliability improved
4 March 2007: Performance problems with especially busy blogs resolved
28 March 2007: Offline process to move blogs from old to new Blogger begins
16 April 2007: 1000th Blog of Note
24 April 2007: All blogs moved off old Blogger, save [this] one
26 April 2007: Blogger Buzz moves to new Blogger, turns off lights on its way out
27 April 2007: DNS change to point www.blogger.com to new Blogger
4 May 2007: Old Blogger physically dismantled

And that’s how it happened. Enjoy the Blogger! (Exciting times are ahead.)

Oh, and due propers to everyone who made this possible. You know who you are, probably.

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