Friday, 17 June 2016

Grow your audience with the Google+ followers gadget

Connecting your blog to Google+ is a great way to attract new readers, as well as build lasting relationships with your followers. For example, you can easily share your posts in the Google+ stream, as well as enable blog visitors to recommend your stuff in a single click. Today we're excited to offer another Google+ perk: the followers gadget.The Google+ followers gadget highlights your total Google+ audience (both its size and some friendly faces), and offers visitors the chance to follow you on Google+. As a result, you can grow your readership across the web, and reach them either in the Google+ stream, or through your blog.
To get started, just connect your blog to Google+, visit the "Layout" tab of the Blogger dashboard, and select "Add a Gadget." You can also read a bit more about today's update in our Help Center.Happy blogging!p.s. Those of you with the Google Friend Connect followers gadget can keep using it, if you like. We retired most of Friend Connect earlier this year, but we'll keep it running on Blogger for the foreseeable future.
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Back in April, we introduced Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger, a gadget that can help you earn money by adding an ad for a relevant product to a blog post and earning a commission when someone clicks on your ad and makes a purchase. We’ve received positive feedback from Blogger users and the advertisers who have made their products available through the gadget, and wanted to let you know about a couple of recent enhancements we’ve made to this gadget:
  • Increased availability: When this gadget first launched, you may not have been able to see the gadget even though you have an AdSense account. We’ve changed this so that all Blogger users located in the U.S. with an AdSense account have the ability to see that gadget in their post editor and can sign up to use Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger. If you tried to find the “Advertise Products” gadget and didn’t see it before, try again!
  • More advertisers and products: The types of advertisers and products available when the gadget became available were in categories such as Department Stores, Sport and Fitness, Office Supplies, Home & Garden, and Apparel & Accessories. We’ve now added 40 more advertisers and expanded our offering to include products in the Health & Beauty, Jewelry, Flowers Edibles & Gifts, Education, and other categories.
Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger is easy to use, and is a great solution for those users interested in choosing the products and brands they want to promote in their blog posts.Here are two examples of a Blogger user finding a relevant affiliate ad: 
Get started today.
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If you’re like many Blogger users, you write in one language, but may have readers from around the world. Not all of them speak your language. Today, we’ve made it easier to bring content from your blog to everyone, with the release of a new Google Translate gadget.
With the Google Translate gadget, visitors to your blog can select their preferred language from the drop-down menu, and using Google’s free translation service, it will display your posts in any of the 50+ languages Google Translate supports.
In addition to the new Translate gadget, we are also introducing a pair of gadgets that allow you to highlight things around the web you care about. For example, with the Blog List gadget, you can highlight blogs you enjoy. With the Text List gadget, you can display a list of your favorite books, movies, or whatever you like - helping your readers get to know you better.
To add these gadgets to your blog, click "Add a Gadget" from the "Layout" tab, and select them from the list of gadgets under "Basics". You’ll see three new gadgets for your dynamic blog, including “Blog List”, “Text List” and “Google Translate”.
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Imagine being able to share your blog with like-minded people across the web. Today we’ve made doing that easier with the introduction of two Google+ gadgets, the +1 button and Google+ Badge. Unlike the +1 button that can appear below a post, this gadget is specific to your blog. Displaying it on your blog will allow visitors to endorse your blog and share it with their friends.  
+1 button for blog
If you’re wondering what a +1 means, think of it as a public stamp of approval from your readers. As soon as someone clicks on the +1 button next to your blog, they’ll also have the option to share it with their friends, contacts, or the rest of the web.  +1s from your readers will appear to people in their circles whenever your blog shows up in Google search results. Here’s an example:
We’re also introducing the Google+ badge gadget, which allows you to connect your blog to your personal profile or your Google+ page on Google+. Adding the badge to your blog helps you connect with friends, fans, and customers. It enables your readers to add you, or your blog to their circles and follow your blog posts on Google+. If you are happy to blog under your real name, people can follow your stream on Google+. If you prefer to blog under a nickname or an established pseudonym, you can create a Google+ Page to represent your blog. Bloggers who wish to remain anonymous should continue to blog as usual. To add these gadgets to your blog, select "Add a Gadget" from the "Layout" tab of Blogger, and select them from the list of gadgets under "Basics". You'll need to copy your Google+ ID (personal or Page) to configure the brand badge gadget for your blog.
Add the +1 and Google+ brand badge gadgets to your blog today to grow and engage your audience.Bora Toska, Product Marketing Manager
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Hi Bloggers.Have you been contemplating a new design for your blog? Are you ready to spruce up your pages with a fresh, modern, and new look? Then you may want to check out Dynamic Views - which now include gadget support. Dynamic Views are a set of templates that make it easy and fun to explore a blog. As you might expect, we’ve made the gadgets interactive too. Instead of appearing in a panel that consumes valuable real estate on your blog, gadgets now appear in a dock that slides in and out as you move your cursor over them.
Gadgets supported in Dynamic Views currently include: Blog Archive, Followers, Labels, Profile, Subscribe (a new gadget - automatically present if either Follow By Email or Subscription installed), and Link List. These gadgets make it easier for your readers to navigate your blog (archive, labels), and to follow it (followers and RSS). If you are currently using a traditional template and change to Dynamic Views, supported gadgets will automatically appear on your blog. Gadgets can be added, removed, or customized from the Layouts tab the same as with any other template. If you’re one of the millions of people who have adopted Dynamic Views since we launched them in September 2011, we encourage you to head on over to our Google+ page and tell us what you like about them!Happy blogging.Bruce Polderman, Product Manager
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Guest Post by Will Price, CEO of WidgetboxIn honor of Blogger’s 10 birthday, all of us at Widgetbox are excited to announce a partnership with Blogger that allows you to quickly and easily turn your blog into a widget. Whether you want to add your blog’s headlines to your main website, let your fans showcase your content to their audience, or you want a widget that helps make your content more discoverable across the web, Widgetbox-powered widgets will help you get the most visibility for your content, while eliminating the need for any manual updating or management.For example, the Blogger Buzz widget below was made in seconds and includes posts, images, and Blogger Buzz branding:
Key Benefits?
  1. The easiest way to build a widget from your blog
  2. Colorful, interactive, and engaging
  3. Easy to add to Blogger and sites across the web
  4. As you update your blog, the widget automatically updates with the latest posts, headlines, and images
  5. Helps you reach new readers and drive traffic back to your blog
How Do You Build Your Widget?Building a widget with Widgetbox is simple, easy, and fun. Simply:
  1. Enter your blog feed
  2. Design your widget’s look and feel
  3. Publish the widget
  4. Add it to your site and watch it spread across the web
  5. Access statistics on unique views, widget installs, and other blogs and domains that have installed your widget
Tens of thousands of Blogger users have already made a widget from their blog on Widgetbox. Take your blog feed, make it into a widget, and share it with everyone. It’s that easy!This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
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by Ross Peter Nelson, Software Engineer, Google CalendarDo you have an event you'd like to invite your readers to?  Thanks to Blogger Gadgets, this is now a piece of cake.  Click the Customize link in the toolbar, and go to the Layout tab.  There, you'll see the Add a Gadget link. The Event Gadget is currently one of the featured gadgets, or you can add it directly by clicking "add your own" and entering the URL http://www.google.com/ig/modules/calendar/socialevent/bloggerevent.xml.  You'll then be taken to a configuration page that lets you enter information about your event. Once you click Save, it will be visible on your blog for everyone to see.The gadget allows your readers to indicate whether they are going to attend the event, and lets them see which of their FriendConnect friends will be there too. In addition, anyone with a Google Calendar account can simply click a link to have that event added to their Google Calendar.You can add multiple events to your blog as long as you give each one a different title or ID, and we'll keep track of who's attending which one.This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!
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(cross posted from Blogger In Draft) Calling all Developers! We've just launched several extensions to the Gadget API that will enable developers to build more relevant and engaging gadgets for Blogger.As you may already know, every Blogger blog is a gadget container. What's more, every blog is an OpenSocial gadget container powered by Friend Connect. This means that as a gadget developer you can leverage social APIs to build engaging tools for bloggers and their audience.In addition to leveraging social data, gadgets can now access a blog's post and comment feed via new JSON APIs. For example, with this data you could easily build a map gadget that maps the geo-location of posts, or a "Most Commented On" gadget that ranks posts by the number of comments they've received.Need to be inspired? Recently we asked our users what gadgets they most wanted to see in Blogger. Hundreds responded and here's their wish list.When you build a gadget for Blogger, it becomes available to millions of active bloggers. Just submit your gadget to us, and within minutes it will surface in the Blogger gadget directory where users can easily browse, configure, and add your gadget to their blog's sidebar.So now that you know Blogger is a great distribution platform for your gadget, what are you waiting for? Get started building Gadgets for Blogger now.Important Note: The APIs and documentation are new, so there may be bugs. Let us know by posting to the Blogger Developer Group if you run into problems developing your gadget.
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by Chris Lambert, Software Engineer, Google Mobile
If you ask people why they blog, a lot of the answers you receive will probably center around the idea of starting conversations. I love talking with friends and family about the countries I've visited and the cities I've explored, and personal blogs are a great way to share these stories. However, I have never met someone who felt they had enough time to post all of the updates that they wanted, especially when they are off traveling. Well, wouldn't it be great if anytime you were traveling somewhere new, taking off on a road trip, or just on your way to an exciting place, there was a way for you to automatically publish that information to your blog? We thought so too, and that's why we decided to release the Google public location badge, powered by Google Latitude.
Google Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile that lets you easily share your current location with a select group of your friends and family and, with your permission, it will continuously update in the background. Latitude is also available as an iGoogle gadget. While Latitude has been really popular, a lot of people -- many of them bloggers -- have asked for a way to share their location information on the Web, for all the world to see. Now with the Google public location badge, you can share your Latitude location with everyone on your blog. Check out Danny Sullivan's blog to see how it looks.To give it a try, visit this website. You will need to be a Latitude user to enable the badge. We made it easy to customize the type of badge that you want on your blog and let you choose between showing either your best available location or just the city that you're currently in. To add the code snippet to your blog, you can either click the "Add to Blogger" button, or copy and paste the code into an HTML/Javascript gadget that you can add from your Layout tab on Blogger.com.Please be aware that by enabling this badge your location will be available for everyone to see; you cannot decide who gets to see it. If you want to have more privacy, you can select 'city-level location' or choose to 'disable' the badge altogether. If you have any suggestions or run into a snag, let us know in our Help Forum.
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Fresh out of Blogger's own testing ground, Google Gadgets have now been enabled for all layouts blogs. This new interface allows for the integration of iGoogle Gadgets directly into your sidebar, with an array of customization options for easy tweaking. Also built into Gadgets is our robust Gadget Directory, which lets you browse through thousands of cool gadgets and add them to your blog with a simple click of a button. You can access Gadgets from your dashboard under the Layout | Gadgets tab (the tab formerly known as "Layout | Page Elements.")Gadgets have built-in configuration for easy integration into your layout. All gadgets are automatically sized to match the width of your sidebar, and their height in pixels can be adjusted using the Gadget's built-in options. Our large list of Gadgets is constantly growing and evolving. You can browse them all from our comprehensive Gadget Directory, which runs the gamut from sports updates to site counters, and flash games to local information tickers. To bring up the Gadget Directory, just click Add a Gadget from your layout. Have an idea for a gadget that isn't listed? Then build it yourself! We are always on the lookout for great ideas, so please submit your own creation to the iGoogle Gadget Directory, and then let us know about it in our Help Group— we may just add it to our 'Featured Gadgets' Section.
copy from google blog
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Tuesday, 14 June 2016

More custom template flexibility


More custom template flexibility

Last May, we added some expressions to our templating language to make it easier for you to customize your blog’s look and feel. These new expressions proved popular with those of you who enjoy advanced blogging tools, so we wanted to offer you even more flexibility. 
Starting today, we’re introducing a new set of operators, which we’re calling lambda expressions, that allow you to apply rules to whole sets of data (think posts, comments, or labels), rather than just individual instances. 
Let’s say you wanted to add a flower image to all posts with the label “Flower,” for example. With lambda expressions, simply define a variable name that each item in the set will take, and then refer to the variable name as though it were each item.
cond='data:post.labels any (l => l.name == "Flower")'>
 
An example of adding a flower icon to posts labelled 'Flower'
There’s lots more that you can do using lambda expressions, like only showing posts in your feed with a given label or quickly calculating how many posts you have with a given number of comments. For a full list of the new lambda expressions available, check out the help forum.
Happy Blogging! 😃
Posted by Luke, Software Engineer

Today, information is at our fingertips and we can access it from anywhere on any device. Just a few taps pull up millions of websites all competing for our attention. For bloggers, engaging with your audience has never been more important or more challenging. To help lay the foundation to a winning engagement strategy, the AdSense team created the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.
Research shows that 29% of smartphone users will immediately switch to another site or app if it doesn’t satisfy their needs.
To help keep your audience engaged, get your free copy of the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.
In the guide, you’ll learn:
  • How to help your audience become familiar with your brand
  • Best practices to design user journeys
  • How to develop content that resonates with your audience
  • Ways to make your content easy to consume
  • Why you should share the love with other sites by referring to good sources
If you’re interested in more updates from the Google AdSense team, follow us on  Google+ and Twitter. We’d love to hear what you think.
Posted by Jay Castro, the AdSense Team.

[Cross-posted from the Google Security Blog]HTTPS is fundamental to internet security; it protects the integrity and confidentiality of data sent between websites and visitors' browsers. Last September, we began rolling out HTTPS support for blogspot domain blogs so you could try it out. Today, we’re launching another milestone: an HTTPS version for every blogspot domain blog. With this change, visitors can access any blogspot domain blog over an encrypted channel.
The HTTPS indicator in the Chrome browser
As part of this launch, we're removing the HTTPS Availability setting. Even if you did not previously turn on this setting, your blogs will have an HTTPS version enabled.We’re also adding a new setting called HTTPS Redirect that allows you to opt-in to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS. While all blogspot blogs will have an HTTPS version enabled, if you turn on this new setting, all visitors will be redirected to the HTTPS version of your blog at https://.blogspot.com even if they go to http://.blogspot.com. If you choose to turn off this setting, visitors will have two options for viewing your blog: the unencrypted version at http://.blogspot.com or the encrypted version at https://.blogspot.com.
The new HTTPS Redirect setting in the Blogger dashboard
Please be aware that mixed content may cause some of your blog's functionality not to work in the HTTPS version. Mixed content is often caused by incompatible templates, gadgets, or post content. While we're proactively fixing most of these errors, some of them can only be fixed by you, the blog authors. To help spot and fix these errors, we recently released a mixed content warning tool that alerts you to possible mixed content issues in your posts, and gives you the option to fix them automatically before saving.Existing links and bookmarks to your blogs are not affected by this launch, and will continue to work. Please note that blogs on custom domains will not yet have HTTPS support.This update expands Google's HTTPS Everywhere mission to all blogspot domain blogs. We appreciate your feedback and will use it to make future improvements.Posted by Milinda Perera, Software Engineer, Security

Back in September, we announced that HTTPS support was coming to blogspot.com, making it possible for you to encrypt connections to your blog; since then, many of you have enabled HTTPS for your blogs. In some cases, not all of your blog’s functionality has worked over HTTPS due to mixed content errors often stemming from your template, gadgets, or blog post content.
To help spot and fix some of these errors, we're releasing a mixed content warning tool that alerts you to possible mixed content issues in your posts, and gives you the option to fix them automatically before saving.
To use the tool, turn on HTTPS for your blog, open the Blogger editor HTML view, and click Save or Publish. If the editor detects any errors they will be shown above the editor, along with the option to fix the errors found.
Happy blogging!
Posted by Shweta Karwa, Software Engineer, Security.

Editor's note: This post was cross posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.
As a form of online marketing, some companies today will send bloggers free products to review or give away in return for a mention in a blogpost. Whether you’re the company supplying the product or the blogger writing the post, below are a few best practices to ensure that this content is both useful to users and compliant with Google Webmaster Guidelines.
  1. Use the nofollow tag where appropriateLinks that pass PageRank in exchange for goods or services are against Google guidelines on link schemes. Companies sometimes urge bloggers to link back to:
    1. the company’s site
    2. the company’s social media accounts
    3. an online merchant’s page that sells the product
    4. a review service’s page featuring reviews of the product
    5. the company’s mobile app on an app store
Bloggers should use the nofollow tag on all such links because these links didn’t come about organically (i.e., the links wouldn’t exist if the company hadn’t offered to provide a free good or service in exchange for a link). Companies, or the marketing firms they’re working with, can do their part by reminding bloggers to use nofollow on these links.
  1. Disclose the relationshipUsers want to know when they’re viewing sponsored content. Also, there are laws in some countries that make disclosure of sponsorship mandatory. A disclosure can appear anywhere in the post; however, the most useful placement is at the top in case users don’t read the entire post.
  2. Create compelling, unique contentThe most successful blogs offer their visitors a compelling reason to come back. If you're a blogger you might try to become the go-to source of information in your topic area, cover a useful niche that few others are looking at, or provide exclusive content that only you can create due to your unique expertise or resources.
For more information, please drop by our Google Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Posted by the Google Webspam Team

In 2011, we announced the retirement of Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites. We made an exception for Blogger to give readers an easy way to follow blogs using a variety of accounts. Yet over time, we’ve seen that most people sign into Friend Connect with a Google Account. So, in an effort to streamline, in the next few weeks we’ll be making some changes that will eventually require readers to have a Google Account to sign into Friend Connect and follow blogs.
As part of this plan, starting the week of January 11, we’ll remove the ability for people with Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers to sign in to Google Friend Connect and follow blogs. At the same time, we’ll remove non-Google Account profiles so you may see a decrease in your blog follower count.
We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow.
We know how important followers are to all bloggers, but we believe this change will improve the experience for both you and your readers.Posted by Michael Goddard, Software Engineer

As bloggers, we all know how important it is to post frequently in order to encourage readers to come back. Of course, the more you post, the more quickly your posts slip down into the archives, making it harder for your readers to discover everything you’ve posted that they might be interested in.
To help make it easier to showcase the posts you want your readers to see, we’ve created a new gadget called Featured Post. With Featured Post, you can choose posts you’ve shared on your blog and highlight them wherever you’d like.
Whether you’d like to re-share that delicious holiday recipe from a few years back, spotlight a can’t-miss promotion you’re running, or just revive something quirky from the archives, the Featured Post gadget is a simple way to show off the content that matters most.
To try it, just head to your Layout tab, add a gadget, and select ‘Featured Post’. You’ll be able to place the gadget wherever you’d like on your blog and then choose the post you’d like to show. If you’d like to highlight something new, you can change the post you feature at any time.
Happy blogging!
Posted by Guy Ronen, Product Manager

This morning we posted an update about Blogspot to Google’s Security Blog https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/09/https-support-coming-to-blogspot.html. Since 2008, we've worked to encrypt the connections between our users and Google servers. Over the years we've announced that Search, Gmail, Drive, and many other products have encrypted connections by default, and most recently, we've made a similar announcement for our ads products. In this same vein, today we're expanding on the HTTPS Everywhere mission and beginning an initial rollout of HTTPS support for Blogspot. HTTPS is a cornerstone of internet security as it provides several important benefits: it makes it harder for bad actors to steal information or track the activities of blog authors and visitors, it helps check that visitors open the correct website and aren’t being redirected to a malicious location, and it helps detect if a bad actor tries to change any data sent from Blogger to a blog visitor. While this initial rollout won’t support all of our Blogger users, we wanted to take the first step to make HTTPS available for Blogspot; for those users who want to try it early. We’re rolling this out gradually and Blogspot authors interested in enabling HTTPS support can begin opting-in today. Simply log into https://www.blogger.com, click on the blog you’d like to make HTTPS enabled, navigate to the Settings page, and select "yes" for "HTTPS Availability". Unfortunately, blogs with custom domains are not supported in this first version.
Once enabled, your blog will become accessible over both HTTP and HTTPS connections. Blogspot authors should be aware that if they choose to encrypt at this time, some of the current functionality of their blog may not work over HTTPS. This can be a result of template, gadgets, and blog post content, and is often caused by mixed content errors, some of which may be fixable by the author themselves. We’ll also be moving some of our own blogs over to HTTPS gradually, beginning with the Official Google Blog and the Google Online Security Blog. For the Blogspot authors who try this out - we’re interested to hear your feedback while we continue to improve this feature and its capabilities! For more information, visit our Help Center. Posted by Jo-el van Bergen, Software Engineer, Security.

Recently we introduced a new set of expressions to the Blogger templating language, designed to let you customize the HTML of each post and page on your blog. We’ve gotten great feedback on them, so we figured we'd offer even more.
Now you can try out new tags, like:
  • b:elseif for a simpler multiple-case b:if branch.
  • b:switch and b:case for succinctly handling several possible cases of a variable.
  • b:eval for evaluation of more complex expressions involving data variables.
  • b:with for creating a nicer variable alias for a calculated value.
An example of customizing the markup of your blog, using the new switch tags.
If you’d like to customize your blog's template using these tags and expressions, just head to the dashboard under Settings > Template > Edit HTML. To see the full specs of the new tags or learn more, check out the help article.
Happy Templating!
Posted by Luke Bjerring, Software Engineer

Blogger's template engine is powered by a flexible editing language, consisting of a set of Widget Tags which use expressions to conditionally change the output HTML for each post and page on your blog.
Using these expressions, you can customize the HTML output of your blog, to adjust the look and feel. You could, for example, show an image behind the header, but only on the homepage. Or add a flower icon, next to a post's title, if the post has the 'Flower' label.
You can customize your blog's template under Settings > Template > Edit HTML.
You can customize your template’s markup, to change the look and feel of your blog.
Previously, the expressions in Blogger's templates could
  • Add or concatenate values with +
  • Subtract values with -
  • Check for equality with != and ==
  • Compare values with <, >, <= and >=
Now, support has been added for many more expression operators, including:
  • Inversion of true/false values with !/not e.g. cond='!data:post.allowComments'>...
  • Checking if a value is a member of a set or array, with in/contains e.g. cond='data:blog.pageType in {"index", "archive"}'>...
  • Combining multiple conditions with and/or e.g. cond='data:blog.pageType == "index" and data:post.allowComments'>...
  • Changing the order of operations with () e.g.
    expr:style='"max-width: " + (data:width + 10) + "px;"'>...
For a full specification of the new operators, see the help article.
Happy Templating!
copy from google blog.
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