New Feature: Gadgets for your Blog

We’ve added some fun new functionality to Blogger in Draft: Google Gadgets for your blog. This feature lets you add pretty much any Google Gadget to your blog’s sidebar.

The Gadget directory is the same one used on iGoogle, which means there are thousands of Gadgets available for you to try. (Note: since most Google Gadgets were designed for iGoogle, they won’t all make sense for display on a blog.)

The Gadget directory is available directly in Blogger Layouts, in the Template | Page Elements | Add a Page Element popup:

This is an early version of our integration with Google Gadgets, so there will likely be some rough edges. Let us know what you think in this post’s comments!

New Features

New! Customise your design

The Blogger Template Designer offers many templates, making it simple for you to create a professional-looking blog. In addition, the Template Designer lets you customise your template. Choose from hundreds of background images, tens of flexible layouts and rearrange widgets through a drag and drop interface. Add gadgets such as slideshows, user polls or even AdSense ads. Changing fonts and colours is easy too. And if that’s not enough control, you can even edit your blog’s CSS and HTML.

New! Earn money

With Blogger, you can earn money just by posting high quality original content on your favourite topics. Blogger has a dedicated Monetise tab that allows you to easily place AdSense ads on your blog. Also, through Blogger’sAmazon Associates programme, you can search Amazon’s product catalogue and add links to products you recommend that earn you commission when your readers buy these products.

New! Pages

With Blogger’s Pages feature, you can create new pages that are linked from your blog. For example, you can create an “About This Blog” or a “Contact Me” page, in a similar way you write a new blog post, and provide links to those pages as tabs at the top of your blog or in the sidebar.

New feature: Search Box

We just added a new feature to Blogger in Draft, the Search Box page element:


It uses Google's Custom Search Engine to dynamically search over your blog's content, as well as anything you've linked to in your blog posts, and even your sidebar-based link lists and blogrolls. In other words, it's really nifty - you can find it in your blog's Template | Page Elements tab, in the "Add a Page Element" popup.

Many thanks to the CSE and Ajax Search API teams for their work on this feature. Comments are enabled for this post, so let us know how it works for you!

How to know if you're using Blogger in draft

If you’re looking around wondering where video upload or the polls page element are, make sure that you’re using Blogger in draft, not regular Blogger. You’ll know that you’re using Blogger in draft if you see the blueprint logo in the upper left of the page:

Blogger in draft is available only on draft.blogger.com. You’ll need to type it in directly (or bookmark it!). If you go to www.blogger.com, you won’t see the features that are still in draft (as of this writing, those are video upload, enclosures, and polls). Remember that if you follow links from your blog, you’ll end up on www.blogger.com.