Introducing "We Love Blogger"!

As today is my birthday, it seems the most appropriate time to introduce you all to my latest blogging venture.

We Love Blogger is a gallery and news portal for Blogger fanatics! Here you will find great Blogger designs to inspire you; links to the latest Blogger news and useful tutorials to help you build a better blog.

The home page should provide easy access to the areas of most interest, with the gallery on the left, news/tips in the center, and a regular sidebar on the right.

In the header, you will find links to submit a new design or news article for later submission to the site.

We Love Blogger is an idea I have had for some time. As you may have read in my previous showcase articles, I love to be inspired by great designs (especially those which prove the potential of Blogger as a blogging platform).

Learning from the experience of other bloggers is important and highly useful when discovering new and interesting functions for this platform. On Blogger Buster, I think tutorials and lengthy articles have become an expectation. Rather than add many short posts and links on this site, I feel it's more useful for readers (and better coverage for Blogger authors) to feature their articles on a dedicated site.

At present, the design (and some functions) of We Love Blogger is not quite complete. Once I am home from vacation, I'll be sure to enhance the overall look and some usability issues for the site to make it a better place to visit and find articles of interest.

In the meantime, please visit We Love Blogger, let me know what you think and also any suggestions for how the site can be improved. I hope you enjoy We Love Blogger and will find this a useful addition to the Blogger Buster family of sites.

Issues with the embedded comment form?

Yesterday a few readers emailed me to explain that there were issues with Blogger's embedded comment form.

The issue was that the "Comment as" drop down menu was empty, preventing readers from choosing an identity for their comments which in turn prevented comments from being left.

As yet, the Blogger team have not acknowledged this issue on the Known Issues (or any other blog), and as far as we can tell, the problem should now be resolved. It could have been a browser-related issue, or perhaps Blogger was making some improvements to the embedded comment form which caused this temporary glitch?

Software Testing Zone wrote about this issue in detail, and has since updated this post to explain that this issue appears to have been resolved. I personally did not experience any problems with the embedded comment form for any of the Blogger blogs I viewed over the past few days, but I am interested to learn more about this issue in case something similar happens in the future.

For anyone still experiencing this problem when reading Blogger powered blogs, try refreshing your browser (press F5 for most browsers, which completely refreshed the page), or clear cookies and temporary internet files to ensure you have a fresh version of the page.

If you were affected by issues with the embedded comment form, please do leave a comment below with some information, such as the browser you were using (Firefox, IE6/7, Safari), whether the blog was using a custom domain or a customized template, etc.

Thank you all for keeping me informed about any Blogger issues you are experiencing! Even though I am not officially affiliated to Blogger, I will do my best to help the Blogger community in any way I can.

Import blogs from another service to Blogger with the Google Blog Converters Project

A few months back, Blogger announced the ability to import and export Blogger hosted blogs. At the time, it was not possible to import blogs from any other service to Blogger, which left many of us a little disappointed though wondering when this service could be made available.

Well it seems there is hope that Blogger can make such a service available through our Blogger dashboards soon enough! Today the Google Code blog announced the Google Blog Converters project: an open source project which aims to make available the ability to import/export feeds from many different blog platforms:

This new Open Source project provides the ability to easily move blog posts and comments from service to service. This initial release provides Python libraries and runnable scripts that convert between the export formats of Blogger, LiveJournal, MovableType, and WordPress.

In addition, the source code includes templates for hosting these conversions on Google App Engine. Future additions to the project will include support for BlogML and synchronization tools between various services that do not provide a import/export feature but do provide APIs for accessing and modifying blog contents.

At present, the scripts provided by the Blog Converters Project are not so user friendly for those unfamiliar with scripting languages (though I hope those of you fluent in Python or familiar with the Google App engine may be able to make significantly more progress than I have!).

Instead, you may be better advised to check out these existing online projects if you need to convert a blog from another host over to your Blogger blog:

• Wordpress2Blogger - Import posts from a Wordpress blog to your Blogger account
• LiveJournal2Blogger - Import posts from a LiveJournal blog to your Blogger blog

I look forward to seeing how this progresses and hope we can expect to see an official Blogger application in the near future enabling us to import directly from our Blogger dashboards!

Please feel free to leave any comments or suggestions about this project below.

Recent Posts with Thumbnails Widget by Engadgeteer

Here is a preview of how the gadget would appear in your blog (based on recent posts from Blogger Buster):

• Related Posts with Thumbnails for Blogger - New Version by BloggerWidgets
  Aneesh of Blogger Widgets has developed a new "Related Posts" script for Blogger which displays thum...Read More
• Resolved! Issues with the Twitter Updates Gadget (and others)
  This issue should now be resolved. I have checked the Twitter Updates gadget (plus others) on variou...Read More
• Profile Avatars for Blogger Comments - Updated
  Displaying avatars beside comments in our blogs has been a long anticipated feature. Today, the Blog...Read More

Grab this widget!
engadgeteer.com - Read Manga Online

The gadget is very easy to install in your blog: simply visit the widget generator page and edit the settings as required. You can preview your feed and then add it to your blog sidebar using the "Add to Blogger" button on the top right of the page.

Thanks Tony for letting me know about this widget!

Thank You to my 10,000 RSS Subscribers

As I logged into Feedburner today, I realised Blogger Buster has reached an awesome milestone - we now have 10,000 RSS subscribers!

It doesn't seem that long ago when I set my first target of achieving 500 daily readers, when Blogger Buster was in it's infancy. How far this site has come since then!

So today I wanted to extend a great big THANK YOU to everyone who subscribes to this site! I'm awed that 10,000 of you enjoy reading my Blogger posts enough to read my updates in your feed readers and by email subscription. This truly makes my blogging ventures worthwhile :)

For those of you who may read on occasion, who have bookmarked Blogger Buster for future reference or have simply stumbled upon this post, why not join the other 10,000 subscribers and also receive regular updates on the latest Blogger tips, tricks and news? Just click the subscription button below and choose how you would like to subscribe - I promise it will take only a few moments of your time.

Subscribe to Blogger Buster

Once again, thank you all for subscribing to Blogger Buster, for leaving comments, sending news tips and templates, and for your engagement in improving the Blogger community!

Happy 10th Birthday Blogger!

Today marks ten years since Pyra Labs first unleashed Blogger onto the world! And how Blogger has grown: from humble beginnings to a multi-national, multi-lingual, Google-owned, highly powerful publishing platform which hosts over 300 million blogs (not counting those hosted on custom domains...).

In celebration of this remarkable date, the Blogger Team have planned some wonderful treats for the Blogger community:

Wait, what? What we could give you? That's right. This is our birthday — but we're celebrating your contributions over the years. Over the past decade, millions of people around the world have made Blogger what it is today: a vibrant community of real people telling their stories. [...]

As we turn ten, we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features on Blogger. Some presents are because you asked for them this spring. Other presents are because they meant a lot to us. And some are because our friends (both inside and outside of Google) wanted to chip in and give you something... (via Blogger Buzz)

Already a few of these blogging treats have been released:

• Support added for the PubSubHubbub protocol which enables our feeds to be syndicated in real-time by supporting feed readers, such as Google Reader. Learn more
• Blogger support added to Google Reader's "Send To" feature, which enables easy syndication and sharing of posts. Learn more

There's a few more features which I suspect (though cannot confirm) will be released soon, and one striking, great big feature which I know will be welcomed by all...

I can't tell you about that yet.

But I promise, the wait will be worth it!

Wishing Blogger and the entire, hardworking Blogger team a wonderful 10th birthday! We're all looking forward to these new, interesting and useful features you have planned for us.

Here's to many more decades of "push button publishing" with Blogger!

Related Posts with Thumbnails for Blogger - New Version by BloggerWidgets

Aneesh of Blogger Widgets has developed a new "Related Posts" script for Blogger which displays thumbnails of images in addition to linked post titles:

In appearance, this Blogger "add-on" is similar to the LinkWithin script. Each section is highlighted in a complementary colour when the mouse hovers over it, and the entire section is clickable, leading to the URL of the "related post" displayed.


Unlike the LinkWithin script, this add-on links directly to the post page it references, and relies on Blogger's label feeds to display posts of true relevance to the post on which it appears.

Aneesh's script seems relatively easy to install. Furthermore, almost all aspects of this add-on may be customized including the style (by editing the CSS), the number of related posts to be displayed and the title of the section in which it is contained.

The image thumbnails displayed for each related post are generated from the thumbnail associated with the relevant post page. Therefore, only images which you have uploaded to each blog post (rather than referencing by URL) will be displayed. In instances where no image appears in the related post, a generic "No-Image" replacement will be be displayed instead.

Overall, I am very impressed by Aneesh's related posts script - it is neat, easily customizable and as the JavaScript is hosted by Google Code this loads very quickly..

Be sure to visit this page on the Blogger Widgets site for full instructions of installation and customization methods to add this useful script to your own Blogger blogs. Save as PDF