Features and Bug Fixes for August 14th

Today’s release to Blogger in draft brings one new feature: Reactions, which are customizable one-click buttons below your posts. Read more on our announcement post, and try them out on this blog.

We’ve added better show/hide controls and brought back the post count and Blogs of Note to the new dashboard, and published it to the main Blogger site.

In case you missed it, we moved Google Gadgets and the gadget directory to the main Blogger site as well.

This release also has some fixes to other Blogger in draft features:

New Post Editor

• Edit HTML mode now has a toolbar.
• The Compose toolbar gets a fifth font size, and “Normal” should now more correctly match the font size on your blog.
• Newly added images will correctly pick up the border styles from your blog’s template.

Import / Export

• Basic settings are now saved and restored.
• Templates (both Classic and Layouts) are saved and restored.
• Exporting a blog will now cause the XML file to download in Safari.
• Import blog messaging now distinguishes between published and draft posts.

Read More

New feature: Reactions

With our new Reactions feature, you can get one-click feedback from your readers. Think of it as a mini-poll for each blog post, or a flexible version of star ratings because you customize what options are available. We hope this will help your blogs get feedback from people who read your posts but don’t have enough to say to for a full comment.

To enable Reactions, log in to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts gadget and then check the “Reactions” checkbox. You can edit the Reactions buttons by clicking "Edit" or clicking the buttons themselves, as shown.

You can customize the location of the Reactions within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box. We’ve found that it looks best when it’s on its own line, but your mileage may vary.

You can customize the options and their label to match the theme and style of your blog.

Additional Notes

• This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Reactions.
• The buttons should blend seamlessly with most blog backgrounds. Button backgrounds are a mostly transparent grey which should, we hope, coordinate with everything. The text and button highlight colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
  
  • Foreground: textcolor, textColor, mainTextColor
    
  • Highlight: linkcolor, linkColor, mainLinkColor
    
• If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the reactions. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Reactions code from a fresh template. Search for “reactions-buttons” to find the appropriate block of code.
• A known issue: if you choose short words/phrases, it’s possible to enter enough options that the line of buttons will wrap (and not look very good). If this happens to you, you'll need to shorten your options or reduce their number.
  

What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!

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