Now for the fun part: when you are writing a post on Blogger, you’ll see an Amazon gadget to the right of your post editor (the “Product Finder”). You can search the Amazon product catalog from within Blogger — type in the name of the product you are writing about, and insert a link to the product, an image of the product, or an iframe containing the image, price details and a “buy it now” button. Every link that’s created contains your unique Associates ID, ensuring that Amazon will credit you for any purchases that result from readers clicking the link on your blog.
If you’re an existing Amazon Associate, completing this setup simply makes the Product Finder available on Blogger for you — you continue to earn the same referral rate from Amazon. New Associates receive the same referral rate from Amazon that they would have received if they signed up directly. If you’re not interested in earning a referral, you can still install the Product Finder: from the “Amazon Associates” page under the Monetize tab, click “I'll do this later — show me more Amazon options” and then click “Add the Product Finder” button.
A quick note about trust: affiliate programs work well when readers trust you. You should avoid promoting products simply because of the referral fee you might earn — readers may lose some of that trust if they sense your posts exist solely to make you money. You may also want to disclose to your readers that you will earn a commission on their purchase — some readers even prefer knowing that you benefit from their business.
There’s more information about this integration at Amazon.com, and the Amazon Associates blog has some more details. This integration is the result of months of collaboration between the engineers at both companies, and we’re very excited to share the results of this collaboration with you. Happy blogging!
Some of you must have wondered what the Next Blog link on the NavBar does, and clicked on the link once or twice. Next Blog used to take you to a random blog, written by a random blogger. Your fellow blogger could have been writing her blog in a language that you don't know how to read. Or you might be someone who likes to read about food and restaurants in Germany, but your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog.
We've made the Next Blog link more useful, by taking you to a blog that you might like. The new and improved Next Blog link will now take you to a blog with similar content, in a language that you understand. If you are reading a Spanish blog about food, the Next Blog link will likely take you to another blog about food. In Spanish!
You might discover a cool blogger who has hobbies similar to yours, has similar taste in electronic gadgets, likes sports that you're into, or has similar curiosities and interests. We will finish rolling out the new and improved Next Blog link over the next week and hope that you will enjoy discovering blogs that are likely to interest you.
This has been a fun, collaborative effort on the Blogger team and we've enjoyed the support we received from other Google teams. We really hope you enjoy the new, more relevant Next Blog as much as we do.
In addition, we've simplified and slimmed down the look of all the navbars, so that they will be more likely to harmonize with the aesthetics of your blog.
To enable the Transparent Light or the Transparent Dark navbar, go to Layout | Page Elements, then click Edit next to the navbar widget:
We had a lot of fun adding this feature and hope you like it too. Try it out!
Specifically, we're looking for six adjectives—three to describe the present, and three to describe hopes for the future. And when you've come up with them, please take a second to let us know what you are thinking. Once we've heard what everyone has to say, we'll follow-up here to share the results.
This is Robin Beck here from Blog Action Day central, and I want to thank Rick and the Blogger team for helping support Blog Action Day 2009.
For those of you who don’t know, Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15th where bloggers across the world unite to write about a single issue on a single day. We like to think of it as one big blogfest for good, and our goal is to spark conversation on an issue of importance across the web.
This year’s topic is climate change, and we’ve thus far had more than 4,000 bloggers from 123 countries register, including many of the world’s largest blogs.
Our aim is to make Blog Action Day 2009 the largest social change event on the web as a demonstration of global concern about the climate crisis. To achieve this, we want to invite the entire Blogger community to get involved and commit to writing a single post about climate change on your blog on October 15th.
In addition to joining thousands of other bloggers, you’ll also be supporting the work of the dozens of leading nonprofits who are also participating – including Oxfam, 350.org, The Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, The United Nations Foundation, and more than forty organizations affiliated with the TckTckTck campaign.
You can learn more about the issue of climate change and see sample topics you might write about at www.blogactionday.org. There you can also find additional ways to get involved by taking action with leading nonprofits and posting a snazzy widget to your blog.
Thanks so much for your support – we hope to have you all as part of the event!
Adding site counters, templates, and other third-party code to your blog can be a great way to add some flare to your content, but can also leave your blog vulnerable to malicious activity if you aren't familiar with its source.
Over the years we've seen a number of third party scripts disguise themselves as helpful add-ons, when in fact they are performing a malicious operation behind the scenes. For example, a site counter widget may indeed be providing your blog with helpful tracking data, but at the same time may also be discreetly sending that information to advertisers for the purpose of collecting the online habits of your readers. A blog template you downloaded from a third party site might include pop-up ads or links to dangerous sites that install malware on visitor's computers.
The good news though is that most of the add-ons you will run across are perfectly legitimate. To protect yourself from the small minority of add-ons that are nefarious, we've put together a few tips to keep in mind when adding third party code to your blog:
Take a moment to review the code and look for anything that seems out of place. For example, if you are adding a weather gadget to your blog and notice in the code that there are links pointing to unrelated sites, take that as a red flag and keep searching for another weather gadget. There is no reason that a weather gadget should include a snippet like <a href="http://completelyfreemoney.com">Make Money Online!</a>
Before saving new template code, always preview first. Malicious template designers may sometimes include pop-ups or other unexpected ads in the template code, which will usually be revealed with a quick preview. If anything unexpected shows up in the preview, go ahead and discard the new code by clicking Clear Edits.
Backup your template! Whenever making significant changes to your blog's template, it's always a good idea to backup your content beforehand just in case you need to reverse changes.
You can easily do this from the Layout | Edit HTML tab by clicking the Download Full Template link and saving the .XML file to your hard drive. You'll then be able to revert back to this downloaded version by clicking the Upload button, also right under the Layout | Edit HTML tab.
Look first to 'trusted' code repositories for a new template or widget. There are probably thousands of places across the web where you can find widget and template code, but it may be helpful to first check out some of the more widely known and trusted sources.
For templates, we've actually done a bit of scouting work already and collected a handful of great resources laid out in this Buzz post from earlier in the year. That collection comes from a number of well-established designers, and should provide plenty of secure template options to dig though.
For widgets and other scripts, there are a handful of places worth your time. Mashable's 50 Great Widgets for Your Blog is a very nice compilation that covers a broad range of categories. Widgetbox is another great portal to countless widget creations, all organized into easily browseable categories. Finally, Blogger's own Gadget Directory has hundreds of gadgets to look through. Simply click the Add a Gadget link under the Layout | Page Elements tab to access them all.
Permissions
Finally we thought it's worth touching on another security area which has proven problematic for some bloggers in the past, and that is your blog's Permissions settings.
Almost every day our support team receives reports from users who've been locked out of their own blog, the result of giving admin privileges to an unfamiliar blogger. Remember, you can always add more authors to your blog, but only extend admin privileges if you absolutely trust the person.
For more information about National Cyber Security Awareness Month, please check the StaySafeOnline.org page as well as the security series on the Official Google blog.
Last week, Google Sidewiki launched to the world as an entirely new way to share information across the web. This new Google Toolbar feature allows you to contribute your own insight to any webpage, as well as read information shared by others right in your browser's sidebar.
Google Sidewiki uses a special relevancy algorithm to display the most helpful entries first, and also has built-in technology to display your entries on other sites which contain the same snippet of text. For a more in-depth look at how it all works, as well as a full overview of all the features that Google Sidewiki has to offer, the team put together a very helpful page which you can check out here.
One feature in particular did catch our attention here on the Blogger team, and that is the ability to post your Google Sidewiki entires directly to your blog. You can watch a quick video tutorial of how it all works below:
We've also made it much easier to upload a profile photo when you leave a comment on a Blogger blog. From the comment preview, click "Add photo" to upload a photo to your Blogger profile. The next time you comment on a Blogger blog, your profile photo will be displayed next to your comment.
To enable or disable profile images in your blog's comments, go to Settings | Comments.
Add it to your site and watch it spread across the web
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!
There are a couple of ways to insert a "Read more" jump to your posts. If you use the new post editor (available on Blogger in Draft, or by enabling it via the Settings tab), you'll notice the "Insert jump break" icon in the editor's toolbar. Click this icon and the "jump break" will be inserted into your blog post at your cursor's position.
If you don't use the new post editor, you can still insert a jump break in Edit HTML mode by adding <!-- more -->where you want to position the jump break.
Want to change the "Read more" text to something more your style? No problem. You can edit the "Read more" text by clicking Layout and then Edit the Blog Posts widget.
One more note, the Jump Break feature does not change how your post appears in your feed. You can configure post feed options by going to Settings | Basic | Site Feed, and editing Allow Blog Feeds. Update: Users that have customized their Blog Posts widget or otherwise have highly customized templates: You may need to edit your HTML to enable Jump Breaks. First, back up your template, then follow the instructions at the bottom of this help article.
We're very happy to announce today that Blogger now has a home on the iPhone. The team behind BlogPress (a popular app already available in the iPhone App Store) decided to build a free version of BlogPress just for Blogger users to celebrate Blogger's 10th birthday. BlogPress Lite packs many of the great Blogger features you have come to know into a simple yet powerful mobile application for blogging on the go.
Rich-text WYSIWYG editing, image uploads, labels, configurable settings, and auto-save are among the many features that are part of BlogPress Lite, as well as a handful of other optimizations for the iPhone experience. Landscape editing mode is supported and will feel very familiar for iPhone users, and blog posts are automatically saved when you have an incoming call—you won't have to ever worry about losing a post.
We're grateful to the team at InfoThinker for adding to the birthday "party." The app has been submitted to the App Store and should be available shortly. (We'll update this post when we see it.)
Periodically, we profile a Blogger partner that can add functionality to your blog. This week we'd like to spotlight Lijit, a company building "search powered web applications for publishers" (that's you!). Lijit has made adding its "wijit" as easy as could be—just fill in your blog's URL and complete the sign-up wizard, you'll be good to go.
What does Lijit give you? For starters, Lijit provides a nice search tool for your site that will not only search your blog, but search the blogs of your friends, and all of the related sites (Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc.) that you and your friends use regularly.
Where Lijit shines is in the stats they gather for you: what are people searching for when they come to your blog? Once they arrive, what do they then look for? Where are they coming from? How has search traffic changed over time?
Best of all, Lijit lets you expose this info via a customizable "wijit" so that your visitors can see where other visitors are coming from and what they are looking for. To see this in action, take a look at Dark UFO's Lost Spoilers site, a Blogger blog focused on unraveling the mysteries surrounding the TV show Lost. The Lost Spoilers wijit shows not only the most recent searches that have brought visitors to the Lost Spoilers site:
It also shows a map of their visitors:
And finally it shows a list of the most recent visitors, their locations, and if they used a search to visit the site, the search term they used:
Interested? Give Lijit a try - just visit their site and you'll have it on your blog in just a few minutes!
We're always looking for tools to make blogging easier, and a number of us on the Blogger team have become big fans of Zemanta. Zemanta is a browser plug-in for Firefox and IE, and is available as a bookmarklet for Chrome and Safari. (More details here, you can download your version of Zemanta here.)
Here's how it works: while you write your blog post in Blogger, Zemanta opens up a sidebar next to the Blogger post editor. After you've written a few sentences, Zemanta analyzes the words in your post and suggests images and video that are relevant to your post; with one click, it inserts them into your post. (The Zemanta screenshot from Flickr in this post was inserted with just that one click.)
In addition, Zemanta looks for words/phrases it's familiar with, and makes it easy to link those words to URLs it knows about. The phrases appear immediately below the post editor in Blogger, and by clicking on them you automatically create the links Zemanta recommends. No more highlighting text, clicking "Link", pasting the URL - just click the words you want linked, and Zemanta handles the creation of the link - to webpages, maps, videos or pictures.
Blogger Labels are easier to use with Zemanta, too: Zemanta automatically suggests labels for your based on the text of your post, and creates the labels for you if you like. Finally, "Latest Update" gives you a list of blog posts from other blogs writing about similar topics. It's a great way to discover sites talking about similar topics, and if you'd like to point your readers to those articles for further reading, clicking on them in the sidebar inserts them as "Related reading" links at the bottom of your post (see below).
If you have a few minutes, the following video review by Blogger user Plug in SEO does a good job covering how Zemanta helps save you time while enhancing your blog posts. The blog post accompanying the reivew is also worth a read.
We'll keep our eyes open for other tools that make your blog better. Stay tuned!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_t03ImqSrON02_oWyCUyA5uMuRh9ZKPBdIfjXYll2NR0S18gCbk_9xtoQvcAiGsRCmZkF9fXCD9_ew4QJnJopNgjeizB4pR_o7ayWcOvphQJglQoVinJipeqcqRMoMHuxwSauD5CZ35ElTpbSUcG7Lu=s0-d)
