You might have already noticed that in addition to the Blogger Template Designer, we added some other new features in our recent release.

First, the accurate post preview, a feature that’s been available on Blogger in Draft, is now available to everyone. Before you publish a post, you may want to preview your post to see how it will actually look to your readers, in the same format and style of your current Blogger theme. To try it, click the Preview button on the New Post page. You will see a new window open with the accurate preview of the post.




We also introduced a new video player that’s based on the YouTube player. The new Blogger video player allows full-screen viewing -- now visitors can watch videos that you published on your blog in full-screen mode. The new player also features a better user interface, such as animated seekbar (the red bar along the bottom of the video) and bigger buttons. You can also right-click on the player to see more information about the video, such as playback performance (“Show Video Info”) or network speed (“Take Speed Test”). Note that despite the new video player, the videos you upload to Blogger are still only visible on your blog, not on YouTube.



As always, please send your suggestions and feedback through the Blogger User Forum. Thanks for using Blogger!

When we launched the Blogger Template Designer to Blogger in Draft in March, you gave us a lot of feedback and suggestions. Our blog post received nearly 1,000 comments and many of you shared your blog’s new looks on Twitter using #newbloggertemplate. Since the launch, we fixed many bugs and added even more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer has only been available on Blogger in Draft, which is why we’re excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer is now available to everyone.




Highlights

How you look online is important, and everybody wants to look unique. With the Blogger Template Designer, you can create your own blog designs through:

• Beautiful new templates. We’ve designed 19 brand-new templates, with more on the way. You can quickly give your blog a great new style by selecting one of the new templates.[1]
• Separating design from layout. Designs are completely defined in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), meaning that any design can be applied to any blog layout, making templates more flexible and unique.
• Hundreds of free, professional background images. We've paired up with iStockphoto to offer you hundreds of gorgeous background images at no cost.
• A single control to change all your design's colors. With other platforms, users have to define every color in their blog separately, making changing the color theme of your blog a tedious task. The Blogger Template Designer lets you change all the colors in your blog at once, by changing the Main color theme.
• Pixel-perfect layout manipulation via smooth resizing. You can define your layout down to the pixel via sliders that update the blog's preview in real time.
• A real-time preview sits below the design control panel. Watch your blog update as you create your template design.
• Keeping it simple. Throughout the Template Designer we use hierarchy to hide complexity from you.
• Complete control. Under the advanced tab, you can override a design's CSS and enter your own CSS in the editor and see your blog's preview updated in real time.
• Cross-browser support. Blogger handles cross browser support for you, so you don’t have to. Want a design with rounded corners? We give it to you in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.

Try it now!

Anyone can try out the template designer here. If you like your design, you can apply it to a new blog or to an existing blog. You can also try the Template Designer on your blog (Design > Template Designer).

Feel free to spread the word with the #newbloggertemplate hashtag on Google Buzz or Twitter. If you are a template designer, you are also welcome to join the Blogger Template Design Group.  If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know on the forums.

As always, thanks for using Blogger!


[1] Note: Selecting a new template will erase all of your customizations on the existing template, so if you have customized your template be sure to first save the current template at Design > Edit HTML.

We're working hard to make Blogger better and need your help. Sign up for a usability study and give us feedback on some exciting new ideas currently in development. These study results will help us better understand your needs and refine our features before they launch.

Interested? Sign up here.

Update: We have now closed the sign-up. We really appreciate your great interest! 

Posted by Caroline Vanderlip, CEO SharedBook


Since we announced the Blog2Print/Blogger program last Fall, we at Blog2Print have been busy enhancing Blog2Print in response to user feedback and requests. Our goal is to maintain the integrity and ease of the blog–to-book creation process while providing you with more editing power and control over your blog books.

I’m pleased to tell you we now offer two different layout options for your blog books: Compact and Snapshot. Compact, the original page layout, arranges your blog posts, captions, and photos into a page that makes the best use of space and minimizes the number of total pages. The new layout, Snapshot, keeps the positioning of captions, photos, and text as it appeared in your posts online.

Meanwhile, we understand that some posts just aren't meant to be preserved, and you should be able to decide which posts you put in your book. Now you can, as individual posts can easily be deleted from your blog book. Especially when given as a gift – sometimes a little editing is needed here or there before a blog book is gift ready. And speaking of gifts, you can now buy a Gift Card for Blog2Print.

A few more changes: we’ve raised the maximum number of photos to 1500 in one book, added Safari support, and modified the User Agreement to clarify that bloggers continue to own all of their content and can resell their books if they choose – just make sure you own all relevant copyrights.

With your invaluable feedback, Blog2Print continues to evolve and improve. Please – keep asking! We’ll keep delivering.

by Jiho Han, Software Engineer, Blogger

When Google Buzz launched in February, many wondered how they could share cool posts to their Buzz stream. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Blogger has made it easy to share to Google Buzz via the Share button in the Blogger navigation bar. Just click “Share”, choose Google Buzz, and you’ll be able to customize your message before posting to Buzz.





Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. Better yet, all comments to your Buzz post get sent right to your Gmail inbox so it's easy to keep the conversation going. Just go to the Google Buzz homepage and give it a try! We know you write interesting stuff, so sharing to Buzz is a great way to spread the word about your blog.

Building your audience is important, and sharing to social networks is a great way to promote your site. We are committed to make the sharing experience better on Blogger: more updates are on their way, so please stay tuned.

by Noah Fiedel, Blogger Tech Lead

Five weeks ago we rolled out Auto Pagination, a major milestone in our efforts to make Blogger faster for you and your readers. We are very happy to report a ten percent overall decrease in page loading latency across all Blogger blogs and a twenty-seven percent decrease on archive pages.

Just how significant is a ten percent latency reduction? It's not often that software engineers get to save lives, yet in just the past five weeks we’ve saved eight human lifetimes spent waiting for pages to load! Every week saves an additional:

• 1 Million Hours
• 114 Years
• 1.6 Human Lifetimes

Some of you have expressed concern over the change in how Blogger displays your blogs. Without addressing each individual case, the vast majority of blogs negatively impacted were not actually blogs, but were using Blogger as a kind of free web host. As today’s post makes clear, Auto Pagination has had an extraordinarily positive impact on how blogs are consumed — blog readers are spending less time waiting for pages to load and more time reading the posts you work so hard to write. (By the way: if your pages show fewer posts than you would like, we recommend using After the Jump to ensure that your readers can see more posts per page.)

If a ten percent improvement has such a major impact, what else can be done to speed up your blog? One area we’re looking at is third-party JavaScript. We remain one of the few blogging services to allow users unlimited ability to add JavaScript to their pages — but that flexibility comes at a cost. These JavaScript widgets often add several seconds to page loads — even on fast Internet connections. We’ll talk more about this in a future post; in the mean time, you can try out Google’s Page Speed to identify what might be causing a page to load slowly.

As always, thanks for using Blogger!

by Siobhan Quinn, Blogger Product Manager​

In the Template Designer, you’ll find:

• 15 new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of professional background images from iStockphoto
• Customizable colors, fonts, and more!

We have more details and tips in our Blogger Template Designer post on the Blogger in Draft blog.

We worked with iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace, to put together a great collection of beautiful images and patterns to use as backgrounds on your blogs. The photos are stunning, and are free to use on your Blogger blog.

That being said, today’s launch is just the beginning. We’ll add more of our own designs over the coming weeks and months and, through the new Template Design Group, we’ll be working with members of the Blogger design community to bring their templates into the new Template Designer.



Help test drive the Blogger Template Designer by logging into Blogger In Draft, and learn more about the new features in more detail on the Blogger In Draft blog.

Blogger and Google Reader are throwing a party at South by South West and you're invited! We'll be debuting a very special feature at the party, so come celebrate with the Blogger and Google Reader teams. Drinks, food, tunes, swag, and good times will be in full effect.

by Vardhman Jain, Software Engineer, Mountain View

Latency is a word you hear a lot at Google. We are always looking for ways to make our products faster, because we have consistently found that faster page loads mean more satisfied users. This post is the first of an occasional series that will discuss ways in which we’re working to make blogs load faster for all users.

A few months ago, we took a look at ways to improve the performance of Blogger blogs, and noticed that many pages — particularly search results pages, label pages and archive pages — were taking longer to load than they should.

This has lots of implications. Users suffer — pages take longer to load, and for anyone around the world who pays for their bandwidth, they can incur unnecessary charges as their browser downloads more content than needed. You suffer, because as latency increases, pageviews go down. (See here for a study Google did last year for this phenomenon at google.com.)

Starting today, we’re rolling out a change that affects how we paginate webpages on Blogger. We will dynamically adjust how much content to send to the browser depending on (a) the amount of HTML on the page being requested (in kilobytes) and (b) the number of images on the page. Users can continue to use “older posts” and “newer posts” navigation elements to see additional posts.

For major changes like this, we do incremental roll-outs so we can monitor performance as they progress. We expect the change to be fully deployed over the next week, and once fully deployed, we expect to see several results:

• pages will load faster
• pageviews, if impacted at all, may increase

We will keep an eye on things, and if we see anything unexpected, we will update this post. Otherwise, keep blogging — and we’ll keep working to make your blog faster for you and your readers!

Earlier today, word spread about some popular music blogs that were recently removed from Blogger. While we make it a policy to not publicly discuss individual users or their accounts, we wanted to clarify a few things about how and when Blogger enforces its Terms of Service as they relate to our DMCA policy.

Last summer, we updated our enforcement of the DMCA. Our current policy is that when we receive a DMCA complaint, we:

• Notify the blogger about the complaint by e-mail and on the Blogger dashboard.
• Reset the offending post to 'draft' status, allowing the blogger to remove the offending content.
• Send a copy of the complaint to ChillingEffects.org.

When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.

Inevitably, we occasionally receive DMCA complaints even though the blogger does have the legal right to link to the music in question. Whether this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are "official," it happens. If this happens to you, it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question. Otherwise, if we receive multiple DMCA complaints for your blog, this could very well constitute repeat offenses, compelling us to take action.

Update: Should have linked directly to the instructions for filing a counter-notification.

Update 2/11/10:  We looked into this issue further and identified one case where a blogger did not receive notification of any DMCA complaints before their blog was removed. We're sorry about this.

We've contacted the blog owner and restored their blog, effective immediately, and we fixed the bug that caused the termination without prior notification. We're also looking into additional preventative protections. We know the DMCA process can be difficult to navigate, and we're working on ways to make this process as smooth as possible.