To create a page, simply go to the Edit Pages tab, which will be displayed next to the Edit Posts tab. The process couldn’t be easier. You can only create up to ten pages (there really isn’t a reason why you need more than this for a simple blog). In addition, a new Pages widget will become available, making it easy for you to list your pages.

The widget will be customizable, allowing you to change the name of certain pages (particularly your home page). Once the feature is rolled out to all users, it is likely that new templates will integrate the feature into them, making it easier to create “About,” “Contact,” and similar pages for your blog.

Please let me know whether you were looking forward to this feature – it certainly would have been useful when I was using Blogger more frequently!

For more information, about this feature, you can view the official release page.

Photo by mathias-erhart

Plugins/Extensions

For Blogger Users: There is a widget that makes it easy to add the “falling snow” effect to your blog. Using it around the holidays doesn’t add too much distractions for your readers, although you have to remember to take it down before spring arrives.

For WordPress Users: An updated version of the “Let It Snow” plugin is now available, with a settings panel to configure the main settings of the plugin.

Snow, Balloons, and More – This plugin includes more options than just falling snow.

Themes

New Year’s Themes: This is a post that I did covering some excellent themes that you can use on your blog around the New Year to celebrate.

Holiday and Winter WordPress Themes: These are still great themes for WordPress users. Download, upload, and activate one of them today.

Icons

You can find a collection of great winter and holiday-themed icons on this post. Check them out.

Conclusion

How will you celebrate the holiday season on your blog this year? Let me know in the comments area below.

If you use Blogger, you’ll find that there are only a very few themes that integrate a drop-down menu into them, and it is often difficult to make modifications to them. Horizontal and drop-down menus are great for showcasing more content. Many popular/premium WordPress themes integrate this feature, and it is common on many large news/content-rich sites for the simple fact that it makes it much easier to showcase more content.

To use them effectively, you need to include solely categories or pages, or both if you are able to fit two menus (one above your logo/header, and one below) within your template. Only the most popular links should be placed in these menus, otherwise it will become cluttered, and rather quickly. At most, only place seven or so links in this area, as the average width of websites prevents much more. Categorizing your pages using the drop-down techniques will certainly help.

There are three pieces of advice I have for anyone who wants to attempt using the procedures listed:

1. Backup your template using the “Download full template” link within the Edit Template area.
2. Know that using any of these “hacks” may break more elements of your template, so you have to know how to correct them.
3. Using these drop-down menus may cause more problems, especially on un-supported themes, and you need to know CSS to better integrate them into your site.

Where to Implement

HTML and CSS menus can typically be “easily” implemented within the back-end panel, through the “Edit HTML” area.

Knowing how Blogger templates work is really key in this, as everything will be manual. You have to realize that it can take well over an hour to properly implement a rather “major” change like this within your website.

You should be starting with this tutorial, which showcases where to implement a basic (although not a drop-down menu).

Essentially, look for the </b:skin> tag within your template, then add the code provided on their site (if you want that look), which is CSS (cascading style sheets). Generally, Blogger templates are split into several areas, alternating with CSS and HTML. Therefore, there are more areas you will have to change, as outlined in their post.

Great Menus to Use within Your Blog

There are a number of great templates available within your blog. I traditionally haven’t added too much code to my posts, instead providing resources to my readers, so this will be no exception.

Flickr-like Horizontal Menu – This menu utilizes CSS and JavaScript including a show/hide sub-navigation menu.

Dynamic Drive CSS Menus – These menus are some of the most popular, and they can generally be easily adapted upon based on your needs. Many utilize jQuery.

Best Practices and Examples for Designing Menus – A guide and resource for people who want to customize their menus.

Suckerfish Drop-down Menus – Beginning with a bare-bones drop-down menu, this one is lightweight and ideal for most sites and people who have some background in editing their theme.

Multi-Level Drop-Down Menus for Blogger – This tutorial is fairly easy to follow through, and uses the same templates from Dynamic Drive for implementation. There are just a few steps.

A Simple Drop-Down Menu – While the others are mostly manual in editing, this one can utilize an HTML/JavaScript widget within the sidebar for slightly easier editing.

Conclusion

Utilizing any of the tutorials listed above will surely help you build a more professional navigational structure within your site. If you have any thoughts on those listed above, please return here to let me know what you think. As in the case of this site, drop-down menus save space and offer more specific areas for visitors to travel to.

Now that the feature is available, you need to know how to enable it and use it. Most people will have to go into the Blogger in Draft area, as the feature is being rolled out over time and may not be available to everyone yet.

To break apart a longer post using the “Read more” link, you can use the code <! — more –> within your content where you want the split to occur. This can also be done through the visual editor using the new button (the one to the far right).

Additionally, you can configure the text through the Layout > Edit > Blog Posts area. You should note that your feeds will not be changed, and will likely remain in full unless you otherwise specify.

These above changes will mostly impact those who are using Blogger’s templates and hose that haven’t been customized. Otherwise, you will have to follow a set of steps in order to enable the feature to work properly.

With no money to continue operation, a revenue model was put into place, with Blogger Pro being introduced. 2002 brought with it the ability to license the product to other companies. Less than three years after launch, Google acquired the service, with intentions of monetizing the service with their own ads and adding it to the portfolio. Google was closely aligned with the blogging community, and they felt that they could continue the brand into the future with the hosting/storage and the people to fuel any new innovations.

Blogger - 1999 Design

Blogger - 2000 Design

Blogger - 2005 Design

The History and a Few Notes

It is hard to believe the direction that blogging has taken since Blogger, or any blog solutions were released. Blogger, even for the most harsh critics of the service, has helped shape the way we blog, the direction of blogging, and the number of people who started blogging. The name itself, Blogger, explains the entire service and purpose of the service.

With the inception of the service, Blogging was meant to be free. However, hosting and development costs ultimately led to “pro” accounts, and subsequently, advertising. However, anything online has these problems – trying to gain new members/users while still trying to generate a solid revenue source.

The takeover by Google was certainly viewed as good for some, while it also marked what could be problems ahead, and some of them are still being faced today. Take a look at the design and set of features available with Blogger. Yes, new themes have been added, a new overall design was introduced after Google purchased the company, and “Gadgets” were introduced, but beyond this, there really aren’t many benefits to using the service over WordPress.com and competing services, which offer a similar or better experience.

I could sit here and list dozens of complains that I have about the service that are echoed by other members, but it is probably the wrong time and place to that. Outweighing the negatives, the service has remained consistent in being able to help people start their first blog and move them onto new levels, and this is what may be the most important.

A Quick Look at its Competition and Growth

It is often hard to judge just how many people visit blogs powered by each blog service without going into advanced metrics. I’ll be posing a simple comparison between them and looking at total traffic (unique visitors) to each service. Because I used Compete, U.S. traffic is more favored.

Traffic for Various Blog Services

The Blogspot.com domain alone receives 49.2 million visitors per month, up 4% this month and 47% over the previous year. The Blogger.com domain adds in an additional 30.1 million visitors, which is mainly the bloggers accessing the admin area. Even with WordPress.com and WordPress.org traffic combined, the audience would be smaller, although growth is stronger for this platform. TypePad, Tumblr, and Twitter, which are all players in the arena, see traffic between 2.4 and 19.7 million visitors each. Growth of Twitter is huge – 1,043% year-over-year.

Also interesting while looking at statistics, is that the following sites account for the most traffic (unique visitors monthly) out of all “.blogspot” blogs, although some may be hosted on their own accounts/domains, which aren’t accounted for.

1. printable-coupons.blogspot.com – 1,504,712
2. picasa-readme.blogspot.com – 1,130,818
3. postsecret.blogspot.com – 661,414
4. googleblog.blogspot.com – 533,639
5. gmailblog.blogspot.com – 445,692

Seven of the twenty most popular blogs are owned and operated by Google staff (Google Blog, Gmail Blog, Picasa Readme Blog, Google Webmaster Central, etc.).

Interesting Facts

These facts were taken from the post on their birthday celebration.

• 270,000 words are written per minute. [At 100 words per post, as many people insert images into content, this works out to about 2,700 posts per minute, at 500 words per post, it's still about 500 posts per minute.]
• Several million people use the service each week to publish content to their blog.
• Two thirds of Blogger’s traffic comes from outside North America. Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K. follow the United States in traffic.
• Soccer (football for international citizens) accounts for the most popular and most frequently mentioned sport, four times larger than the number two sport, baseball.

You are urged to post how Blogger has helped you over the years and what the landmark tool means to your life.

The themes below are all compatible with Blogger Beta, but they do require more initial work to setup than many other, simpler themes. However, don’t let that deter you from trying them out. Just be sure to create a backup of your current template and any customizations that may be lost, including widgets.

By definition, we have applied the magazine term to templates that have a two or more column, excerpt view or themes that features more advanced features. Ultimately, we wanted to create a small, but good collection of advanced themes.

Versatility Lite [Demo | Release Page] – A clean, unique template for Blogger that is fairly easy to setup.

WP-Premium Blogger Template [Demo | Release Page] – A red/brown/white theme converted to Blogger from WordPress. It features advertisement options, tabbed are for content, and more.

Revolution Church Template [Demo | Release Page] – Another advance magazine template with advertisement areas and plenty of areas for placing content.

Revolution Lifestyle Template [Demo | Release Page] – A free/premium theme that has been converted from a premium theme.

Revolution Code Blue [Demo | Release Page] – The complete set of “Revolution” templates, in gray, red, and blue varieties.

Firebug Template [Demo | Release Page] – A dark three/four column template with a built-in search box, RSS posts feed and RSS comments feed.

Charcoal Template [Demo | Release Page] – A dark/brown three three column template.

Funky Zine [Demo | Release Page] – With a unique, three column, widget-ready template, this theme will set your blog apart from the rest.

Magazine Template 3 [Demo | Release Page] – An advanced theme with plenty of unique features to empower your blogging.

Blue Steel [Demo | Release Page] – Featuring a unique layout for lots of content, there is a recent posts area, themed icons for sidebar widgets, post features and options, custom favicon, and more.

Statement [Demo | Release Page] – A clean two/three column template with a white and black color scheme.

Maggo Magazine Template [Demo | Release Page] – An excellent magazine template that consists of advertisement options, styled comment boxes, a built-in search box, and more.

White Space Template [Demo | Release Page] – A clean, gadgets-ready template for the Blogger system, with three columns, an integrated search box, and customized comment styling.

Imprezz [Demo | Release Page] – A vibrant, unique theme with good navigation menus, RSS subscription buttons, and more.

D’Bluez Template [Demo | Release Page] – A clean, blue and white template with a three column layout.

Arthemia Magazine Template [Demo | Release Page] – A converted magazine template with several unique features and areas for placing advertisements.

Vibrant Template [Demo | Release Page] – A WordPress theme converted to Blogger, with three columns, AJAX tabs, a stylish navigation menu, and with valid XHTML and CSS code.

Forte Template [Demo | Release Page] – A rather clean theme with three columns with a tabbed area.

Visionary Reloaded [Demo | Release Page] – A clean magazine theme originally designed by Justin Tadlock, re-coded for Blogger.

WP-Polaroid Blogger Template [Demo | Release Page] – A theme with Flickr photo slideshow integration, MyBlogLog recent blog readers widget, advertisement spots, recent posts list, and more.

Turn Out Mag [Demo | Release Page] – A template that has been converted from a WordPress theme.It features thumbnails automatic thumbnails on the front page, two main columns, banner advertisements and AdSense areas, an integrated search box, search engine optimized code, and a featured video area.

Ads Theme [Demo | Release Page] – An extremely popular template that resembles more advanced themes, with a three column layout and plenty of advertisement options, hence the name. It also has an integrated FeedBurner RSS and subscribe via email sidebar module, built-in MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog recent reader widgets, dynamic tabs, and a properly setup layout editor.

Zinmag Remedy [Demo | Release Page] – A two/three column template with advertisement options, extremely unique features, and a feature-rich set of options. There are quite a few steps required to get it working properly, however.

Bizmax [Demo | Release Page] – A three column, advertisements-ready theme with advanced features and a pleasing layout. Plus, the theme appears easier to work with than other themes (as not much documentation is required/has been posted).

Reflection [Demo | Release Page] – A three column, blue, white, and black template designed for showcasing your artwork, portfolio, or more. There are several features that you will have to configure when you install the template, but it fairly straightforward.

Schemar Magazine [Demo | Release Page] – A three column, search engine optimized theme with thumbnails on the main page, a featured video area, and plenty of additional features.

Business Ads Ready Template [Demo | Release Page] – A template suitable for businesses and it’s easy to setup.

Magazeen [Demo | Release Page] – Originally designed by Smashing Magazine, this is a unique theme with a unique thumbnail-based layout, and footer area.

Grid Focus [Demo | Release Page] – A clean, simple theme based on a popular WordPress theme. The template might not be magazine-styled per se, but it is ideal for placing lots of content.

Daily Inspired Template – Release Page – A clean, advanced theme that was released based on the Woork/Daily Inspired template. Not in use/no demo available.

Conclusion

We really only scratched the surface when it comes to the number of quality Blogger templates available. Magazine themes continue to rise in popularity as they provide a somewhat good layout when you really have to place everything on the main page. However, the layout might not always be best in terms of interface for your users to browse your blog – it is quite overwhelming if you don’t have an underlying structure using a magazine template.

If you have any further suggestions, if you’ve used any of the templates before, or would like to share your thoughts, please feel free to post your comments below.

New Features for “Regular” Blogger:

• On the Blogger Features page, as well as the announcement post, these updates port the (previously draft) version of the Blogger Dashboard to the non-beta version, adding “hide” and “show all” to the list of blogs.
• Google Gadgets in your layouts blog now automatically resize based on the size of the gadget, if the gadget supports that feature.
• Adding image ads becomes easier through AdSense, as you can select to have image ads displayed over traditional contextual advertisements.  
• The Flag Blog button in the navbar now pop-ups a window for you to tell the Blogger team why the blog violates our terms of service.  This comes after many blogs were marked as spam, so this button allows a set of human viewers to review the blog, which is not handled by the automated spam locking system.

Bug Fixes:

• Moto template overlap in Internet Explorer 7.
• Block of the /feedReader Json URL from web crawlers, reducing the number of 404s in the Webmaster Tools area. 
• Increased cacheable CSS and JavaScript throughout Blogger, which may increase page load speeds.
• Button style and layout improvements throughout the system.

A Review of All Features:

• Easily publish and create a blog using the system.
• A simple-to-use interface
• Free website using the Blogspot.com domain name.
• Easily customize your template.
• Add photos and videos to your post.
• Feedback from readers through comments.
• New post notifications.
• One simple ID to sign into your account.
• Support for more than forty-one languages.
• Posting on the go through the use of mobile blogging and MMS.
• Group blogging with the use of privacy control.
• Third-party application support.

New Features for Blogger in “Draft”:

A review of these features is available on this post.

• Better show/hide controls in the Blogger Dashboard area, with post count and Blogs of Note.
• New Post Editor – Edit HTML mode now has a toolbar for quickly editing the code of posts, the Compose toolbar now has a fifth font size, plus “Normal” should now more correctly match the font size on your blog.  In addition, images will correctly display in relation to the border styles from your blog’s template.
• Import and Export – Basic settings are now saved and restored, templates (Classic and Layouts) are saved and restored, exporting a blog will cause the XML file to download in Safari, and import blog messaging now distinguishes between published and draft posts.
• Reactions - Receive one-click feedback from readers using this feature, as they can customize which reactions are displayed.  For example, the Blogger in Draft Blog uses “useful”, “not useful”, “buggy”, and “shippit”, which allow you greater control over quick feedback, in addition to the newly rolled-out star ratings system.  
  You will need to go to the Blogger in Draft panel and add this feature in from the Layouts>Configure Blog Posts area.  You can customize the words/background based on the color of your blog, similar to the Blogger navbar.  
  People using Classic templates will not be able to use this feature until you upgrade to Layouts.  There are a few recognized bugs.

Features of Blogger
Click image for larger view.

Conclusion

While I try not to post all insignificant announcements, this is a fairly significant roll-out of new features for people using the Blogger blog publishing system (which is quite a significant amount).  Along with the recent announcement of Movable Type Pro and Version 4.2, the evolution of blog systems is continuing at a rapid pace, allowing you to create a fully customizable social publishing platform.  Previously, these systems were essentially created for publishing textual thoughts and a few images here and there.  Today, nearly everything has changed.

It is good to see that Blogger continues to evolve, considering that it is one of the two to three major blog systems.  Although it shouldn’t be recognized as the best, it is certainly looking, with this recent release of features, that the team is working on features that bloggers are looking for, instead of simply trying to persuade more bloggers to crowd their blog with AdSense advertisements.

These features were all announced on June 26th, 2008.

General Features Affecting Blogger in Draft

1. Blogger in Draft dashboard may now be set as the default area when signing in.
2. Google Gadget integration improved, with better editing of gadget preferences.
3. Dashboard area improved with new tweaks, including a new button style – “show all blogs’ toggle is now sticky.
4. Subscribe page element had “www.” added.
5. Blogger Dashboard now displays recent posts (in tabbed fashion) from both the regular and draft Blogger blogs.

Webmaster Tools Verification

[Source Post]

• This feature allows you to use Google Webmaster Tools with your Blogger blog.  You are now able to view information about your blog as Google’s search engine sees it – how often Google’s web crawlers visit your site, who links to your blog, what searches are used to find your site, and control how your page appears in the web results.
• These settings can be found by visiting the Blogger in Draft dashboard, then click on on the link to Webmaster Tools, found under the “Tools and Resources” area.  All your blogs are added to Webmaster Tools and verified automatically.

Star Ratings

[Source Post]

• You can now (without external tools) add star ratings to every post footer.  Enabling this feature is easy – go into the Layouts page and click the “Edit” link of the posts page and check “Show Star Ratings”.
• More notes on this feature can be found on the release post, linked above. 

Importing and Exporting

[Source Post]

• Another great feature, importing and exporting allows you to backup all your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file, which allows easier backup.  
• You can then use the backups to import them back into your blog if you accidentally delete something or you blog is hacked.  
• To use the feature, go to the Settings > Formatting page, then go into the Blog Tools links area and either import or export your blog’s XML file.
• Upon importing, all the posts will become saved as “imported”, so you can choose which ones will be published.  
• Other Abilities: Merge two or more blogs into one, move individual posts from blog to blog, back up your blog to your own storage, move your blog somewhere else.
• Problems: Doesn’t backup blog settings or templates, can be confusing for first-time users fearing their data may be lost.

Embedded Comment Form

[Source Post]

• Comment forms can now display below posts, much like other blog systems.
• Change the format of your comments by going into the Settings > Comments area and choose either “Full Page”, “Pop-up Window”, or “Embedded below post”.  
• Works as normal with any other features, such as verification, that you may have enabled.

New Post Editor

[Source Post]

• New post editor is “more stable, compatible, predictable, and functional”.
• Focuses on image and raw HTML improvements
• Note: Autosave is disabled in the new post editor.
• Improved image handling – images appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box, allowing you to upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience.
• Images will be placed at the cursor insertion point, instead of at the top of the post and drag and drop functionality is now enabled.
• Easy image resizing and removing.  (issues for Firefox 3 – need to double click to activate)
• Improved Raw HTML – allows you to insert breaks distinguishing different elements – tables, lists, scripts, styles, preformatted blocks, or objects, whereas before a
tag would have been inserted.  You can turn this feature off, a similar feature is available in WordPress.
• Other Features: Easy link editing, full Safari 3 support (Windows and Macintosh), new preview dialog for viewing posts in a similar format as what would appear on your blog, placeholder image for object tags.
• There are numerous missing features – spellcheck, video upload, Hindi transliteration, Bi-directional text controls, Toolbar for Edit HTML mode, FTP file upload, and enclosures, as well as Known Issues, so if you are uncomfortable using Beta tools, you may want to continue using the default editor.

Please use the “Source Post” links to view images and additional details about each feature, this post serves as an outline of them and a few of my thoughts.

Conclusion, Final Thoughts

I have taken a look at many of these features, and for the most part, they are performing as they were meant to, with some bugs here and there.  Each of these advancements helps the Blogger system distinguish itself from others, and improve the blogging experience for people who are just beginning to blog. From what I see, the Blogger team appears to be working more on usability and smaller features that puts it in line with other blog platforms and allow more flexibility for people using their own domains.

Leave your thoughts on these new enhancements (if you have chosen to use Blogger in Draft), whether you like them or would rather see more improvements to what is already included.

To take advantage of the feature, follow these simple steps:

1. Sign in to your account and enter into a post.
2. Click the ‘Post Options’ toggle to show the “Post date and time” fields.
3. Type a date and time that’s in the future.
4. Hit the “Publish” button, and the post will become “scheduled”, and will be published when the date has been reached.

When a service comes out of “beta” mode, it typically means that the version has been tested and will work properly for most users.  This new feature is a great addition to Blogger.  As an avid WordPress users, this is a necessary feature for extending the possibilities of blogging when you are unable to blog at certain periods of time.

For more details about posting with this new feature, read the Blogger Buzz Blog.

Today’s Fixes:

• The “Add another image” link in the image upload box now works even if you haven’t filled in a URL.
• The labels field in the post editor autocompletes more predictably when one label starts with the same words as another.
• URLs in the Name / URL part of the comment form are now validated.
• Header fixes for the 897 and 565 templates.
• The draft / published / scheduled filters on the Edit Posts list now work reliably in Internet Explorer.
• Videos uploaded through Sony Ericsson phones now appear as enclosures in the blog’s Atom and RSS feeds, so they can be retrieved with a video podcast client.
• Miscellaneous typos and translations corrected.

Other Recent Changes:

• New blogs have OpenID commenting enabled by default.
• XFN rel="me" links between blogs and profiles.
• Adding more than 5 poll choices now works in Internet Explorer.
• The search box on the Edit Posts page is now available in all supported languages.
• The “www” redirect option is now available for custom domains that end in “.co.uk.”
• New “Related Resources” box on the Dashboard links to AdSense, Google Reader, and Picasa Web Albums.

[via Blogger Buzz]