Welcome AOL Journals Users!

As some of you might know, AOL has recently decided to sunset its AOL Journals service. To help Journals users continue to share their thoughts online, Blogger has built a simple migration tool to move an AOL Journal to Blogger. We'd like to welcome our new Blogger users to the community and are looking forward to hearing what they have to say!

We've been hard at work here at Blogger and have added a number of new features in the past few months. If you're a Journals user who wants to explore our features, or even if you're already a Blogger user but you want to see what's new, check out our features page. Over in our user group you can share your blog with others or find new blogs to follow. If you're still hungry for more blogs, the Blogger team regularly posts interesting and noteworthy Blogger-powered blogs at Blogs of Note.

Below are some more resources for new Journals users. Welcome again!

• Take a Tour
• Help Resources
• User Group

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Commenting made easier

Today we’re bringing the embedded comment form out of Blogger in draft and making it easily available to everyone. This feature puts the comment form at the bottom of each post page, below the comments, instead of on the separate, Blogger-styled page.

The embedded comment form is more convenient for your readers because they can use it to post a comment immediately, without clicking over to a different page. It also looks better, since it matches your blog’s style and colors.

If you’re logged in to Blogger with your Google Account, you can also subscribe to comments via email by clicking the “Subscribe” link. Unlike with the full page comment form, you don’t need to post a comment to subscribe.

To enable the embedded comment form for your blog, go to the Settings > Comments page and look for the Comment Form Placement setting. Change it to Embedded below post, save your settings, and go check out a post to see the new form in action.

The embedded comment form works on both Classic and Layouts templates, though if you’re using a heavily-customized Layouts template you may need to reset your widget templates before the embedded comment form will appear.

We think that the embedded comment form is a big improvement, so we’ve made it the default setting for all new blogs. 

Happy commenting!

Update, 10/23: We regret that this feature is being enabled for some existing blogs that didn’t specifically enable it. We are working to undo that, but in the meantime if you see this on your blog and don’t want it, go to Settings > Commenting and change Comment Form Placement to either “Full page” or “Pop-up window.” 

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Publish to your Blogger blog from iGoogle

Today, we’re releasing our Blogger Post Gadget for iGoogle. Now you can edit and publish posts directly from your custom iGoogle homepage, making it even easier to share your thoughts with the world.

To get started, just click that “+ Google” button to have the Blogger Post Gadget added to your iGoogle page.

You can use HTML in the text box, but if you want more rich text editing — for example, to upload a photo — just click “Save Draft” and you’ll get a link to edit the post in the full Blogger post editor.

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