GrandCentral: receive calls and post voicemail with your blog

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
   

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So long, and thanks for all the Help!

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

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Blogger now in Filipino

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!

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Updates and Bug Fixes for February 12th

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:

• Comment pagination is not yet available for Classic templates
• The “Shrink to Fit” option in the Header and Picture page elements only affects new photo uploads
  

(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!)

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