Keeping Up To Date With Blogger’s Features
In recent months, Blogger have added quite a few new features to the system: scheduled posts, Google Gadget integration and a dynamic blogroll are among the freshest and best upcoming features for this popular blogging platform.
So if you use Blogger to publish your blog, how can you keep updated with the latest news and discover new features as soon as they become available?
In this post, I’ll tell you about the sites I use and subscribe to in order to receive updates and news about Google blogger.
Official Blogger/Google resources
Blogger in Draft allows you to test new (beta) features before they are released into the mainstream Blogger service. You will often discover that new features are available to use here even before they are announced on Blogger’s various blogs (scheduled posts, for example, were available to some users at least a week before this was announced on the official Blogger in Draft blog!).
You can subscribe to the official Blogger in Draft blog to receive updates of new features which are available on the Blogger in Draft platform. This is especially useful if you have discovered a bug with a new feature, as updates and fixes are announced here too. You can also report bugs by leaving a comment in the relevant post.
The Blogger Buzz blog has been going for a few years now, and details news about Blogger in general, including any major bug-fixes, staff announcements and the like.
This official Blogger blog details known issues for the Blogger publishing platform, and updates when these problems are resolved. For those experiencing problems when publishing their Blogger blogs, this is a good place to locate answers and updates.
Other Highly Useful Sites and Resources
This unofficial blog documents all things Google and features regular insights regarding Blogger, including usage and new features. This link will direct you straight to the “Blogger” category for you to easily browse articles relating to Google Blogger.
I admit I was rather surprised to find that Lifehacker has a category specifically for articles about Blogger! In fact, this category features some rather useful information about the Blogger platform. You can even subscribe specifically to Blogger-tagged posts to filter your updates to this category.
It’s not all that often that Mashable feature articles about Blogger, but there are occasions where this blog breaks news, discusses Blogger’s shortcomings or offers a useful resource post. I have this link bookmarked and check regularly to see what Mashable can offer to those using Google Blogger, though as far as I can tell there is no method to subscribe directly to this category.
Nitecruzr’s blog is a wealth of information about the status of Blogger. Here he posts about error codes, Blogger issues and workarounds which are of great use to anyone experiencing problems with Blogger or who like to be updated about the “real” status of this platform.
One final service I use to receive updates and news about Blogger is Google’s free “Alerts” service. Here you can query specific terms from Google’s search results and be updated of new content by email each day when a new relevant feature is crawled.
I use Google Alerts to be updated of news items which reference “Google Blogger” and “Blogspot” as the generic term “Blogger” can bring too many results which are not connected with the Blogger platform specifically. You could also try using a Technorati Watchlist for updates of Blogger-related news, but again I find the results of this to be too generic for my needs.
If you know of any other useful resources for updates about Blogger features and status, please let us know by leaving your comments below.
Scott Fillmer | April 21st, 2008 at 11:34 am #
I love many of Google’s products and services but blogger just isn’t one I can keep up with. I moved all my stuff over to wordpress a long time ago but still have to keep a blogger profile and blog for those pesky blogs that only allow comments on blogger.
I love the resources you listed, thanks. One of the best and my favorites is the google alerts.