What is Blocking?

You have the option to block any of your followers by clicking the blue "Block" button. This will remove the user from your Following widget so their image will no longer appear on your blog. However, if your blog is public the user can still subscribe to your blog, read your posts and comment.

How do I add the Following gadget to my blog?

Do you want to know who regularly reads your blog and develop a public fan base for your blog? Well now you can do that and more with the Blogger Following feature! In Blogger, users can publicly Follow any URL to tell the blog's author and the world they are a fan. With the Followers gadget, you can display your blog's Followers on your blog to show your blog's popularity and encourage more readers to stay updated with your posts.

How to create an “Admin Control Panel”in your layout.

Hiding the Blogger nav-bar is one of the most popular customizations for Blogger blogs. The advantage of this is that your blog design does not immediately appear to be powered by Blogger, and it is very useful for designs where the appearance of the nav-bar distracts from the overall design of the blog.
The only downside of removing the nav-bar is that the admin links for “New post”, “Customize” and “Log Out” are no longer visible. When the nav-bar is visible, blog administrators can create a new post or customize their layout with just one click; when the nav-bar is hidden, many more clicks are required to access the dashboard panel again.
In this post, I’ll explain how you can easily add a “Admin Control Panel” widget which enables one click access to the main sections of your dashboard if you have hidden the Blogger nav-bar from your layout.

Why is Google Releasing a Browser?

Updated Analysis: Google, in a blog post on its web site has acknowleged the existence of Google Chrome, a browser that the company will be releasing tomorrow.Kara swisher has confirmed the existence of Google Chrome, a browser developed by the Mountain View, Calif.-based search company. The rumors of the browser were reported earlier on Google Blogoscoped, which received a comic book that outlined the key features of the browser.

• It is based on Webkit and will include Google Gears.
• It has a browser extensions framework that will allow it to make Adobe AIR-type hybrid apps.
• It includes Javascript Virtual Machine called V8 that was developed by a team in Denmark. It accelerates the Javascript performance and is multi-threaded.
• It has tabs, auto-completion, and a dashboard-type start page that can help you get going to the web services you need. Opera has such a dashboard.
• It has a privacy mode that allows you to use the machine without logging anything on the local machine. It might be similar to a feature called Incognito in the latest version of Microsoft IE.
• Malware and phishing protection would be built into the browser.

How to easily make our own web 2.0 blog logo

It’s a question I get asked quite often and I figured it’s easier just to write a post about it. Many people who download Blogger templates or Word Press themes from our site would like to replace the default header image with one more personal and professional-looking. Some templates come with header logo or some with just plain text so it would be nice if you could spice up your blog with a cool Web 2.0 logo wouldn’t it?
There are a couple great free sites out there that allow you to instantly create a Web 2.0 header logo for your website. You don’t need any photo editing software experience or technical knowledge — just type in the text you want, select the style, font size, color, etc and voila — you’ve got a brand new Web 2.0 logo!Two of the free sites I would recommend and which is actually how I first created the logo for this site. Here’s one I recently built in less than two shakes of a lambs.

Page Elements Tags for Layouts

The section of a Layouts template is made up primarily of sections and widgets. Sections mark out areas of your page, such as the sidebar, footer, etc. A widget is an individual page element such as a picture, a blogroll, or anything else you can add from the Page Elements tab. You can include any HTML you like around the sections in your template.
A tag can have the following attributes:

• id - (Required) A unique name, with letters and numbers only.
• class - (Optional) Common class names are 'navbar,' 'header,' 'main,' 'sidebar,' and 'footer.' If you switch templates later, these names help Blogger determine how best to transfer over your content. However, you can use different names, if you like.
• maxwidgets - (Optional) The maximum number of widgets to allow in this section. If you don't specify a limit, there won't be one.
• showaddelement - (Optional) Can be 'yes' or 'no,' with 'yes' as the default. This determines whether the Page Elements tab will show the 'Add a Page Element' link in this section.
• growth - (Optional) Can be 'horizontal' or 'vertical,' with 'vertical' as the default. This determines whether widgets within this section are arranged side-by-side or stacked.

What you will learn from this book.

The book aims to be a "complete" guide to working with Blogger. The focus is on more advanced, professional uses. You will learn everything you need to know to extend your blog and grow beyond the basics of using Blogger. This book will cover the following:

• Customizing and creating templates to make your blog attractive
• Adding social bookmarks to your blog to promote your site
• Joining the blogosphere to drive traffic to your site
• Customizing your blog by using widgets effectively
• Customizing your blog's RSS and Atom feed, so that the Blogger feeds are available to the users
• Managing ads and adding e-commerce features
• Monitoring viewers and ads using Google Analytics
• Managing and optimizing your blog for search engines Integrating
• your website with your blog

How can I use the Blogger Layouts features?

Are you tired of dealing with HTML and CSS every time you want to change the look of your blog? Well, it turns out that there's an easier way. With the Layouts feature, you can drag-and-drop to move parts of your page around, and choose new fonts and colors with easy mouse clicks. Newly created blogss will work this way automatically, but for blogs without this feature, you'll need to upgrade your template. Here's how.

1. Find the name of your blog on your dashboard, and click the Template link next to it. If this link says Layout instead, then it's already upgraded and you can skip the rest of these steps.
2. On the Template page you should see the standard window of HTML code. Now look in the navigation links for the tab that says Customize Your Design and click it.
3. You'll get a message explaining that Blogger will make a backup of your current template and replace it with an upgraded one. The backup will be made available indefinitely, so you can revert back to it later if you need to. Click the Upgrade Your Template button to continue.
4. Choose one of our default template designs. You'll be able to modify it all you want, once you pick one of these as the starting point. Click Save Template when you've made your choice.

When the Spam Hits the Blogs.

Owners of the conversational websites known as weblogs have recently noticed that their referral logs have become the newest target for spam.
Referral logs, intended to collect information on who visited a website and how they happened to arrive there, are being stuffed with bogus links. Curious bloggers who click on a logged link to see who visited their site are instead led to pornography or advertising sites.
Some bloggers publish a list that automatically updates links to sites that have linked to them. So visitors to spammed blogs who explore the link lists also find those sites full of porn and sales pitches.
In most cases the link spam appears to have been added to logs by one of several companies that are selling a service they describe as "referral marketing."
Unsurprisingly, bloggers are not thrilled, even though they ruefully admit that the log spamming may falsely boost their ranking on some search engines.
Some search engines decide site ranking by factoring in the number of pages that link to a site. A site that's linked to heavily may appear among the first URLs returned in response to users searches.
But search rank improvement or not, bloggers want referral marketers to leave their logs alone.
"It's not just that they somehow sneak into my weblog, it's that they are hitting my site so hard. One day there were more than a thousand hits from one single porn site," complained Åsk Wäppling, known to bloggers as "Dabitch."

Why Did Google Want Blogger?

SAN FRANCISCO -- Forget war and strife, the only news that mattered on the Web this week was Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs, the scrappy San Francisco startup behind the Blogger weblogging tool.
News of Pyra's sale for an undisclosed sum broke on Feb. 14, but details about the deal have so far been scant. Neither Google nor Pyra is saying much about it. Evan Williams, Pyra's co-founder, blogged his day-to-day life for the last three years right up until it got interesting. Williams pulled his blog offline earlier this week.
Meanwhile, thousands of weblogs and weblog indexes like Daypop and Blogdex have been loaded with debate about what the deal meant for the Web, for searching and for blogging. The acquisition has puzzled some onlookers: what would a search company want with a tool for making weblogs?
Someone in a unique position to speculate is Chris Cleveland, CEO of Dieselpoint, a search software company based in Chicago that worked with Pyra last year to develop a search engine for Blogger.
"We worked on this project for a couple of months and everything seemed to be going pretty well until about January when communication stopped," said Cleveland. "Now I know why."
Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs.
The secret, Cleveland said, is in the scores of links webloggers create every day to content on the Web.
Google became the preeminent search engine by exploiting the structure of hyperlinks that make up the Web. Instead of using a simple keyword search, which is how most early search engines found their results, the company developed a proprietary system, called PageRank, which looks at hyperlinks as well as keywords to determine which pages are most popular on the Web.

What is the Blogger data API?

The Blogger data API allows client applications to view and update Blogger content in the form of Google data API feeds. Your client application can use the data API to create new blog posts, edit or delete existing posts, and query for posts that match particular criteria.
Here are some of the things you can do with the Blogger data API:

• Add a running list of blog posts and comments to a site.
• Create a desktop application or plugin that allows users to create and post entries from the desktop.
• Create a blog aggregator application.