As you may have read in Kevin’s recent post, Blogger is in the process of adding some major new features to the system. Currently available to those logging in through Blogger in Draft, the most prolific features include:

• A comment form beneath blog posts
• An import/export feature (which can also be used as a backup system)
• Star ratings, which readers can use to rate your posts
• A brand new post editor, with much greater functionality

In this post, I’ll go over these major updates in more detail, to explain how they can be of benefit…

Blogger in Draft yesterday announced some new features which you can try out in their draft area.

Here’s a quick list of some of the new features :

• Google Gadget integration continues to improve, with better editing of gadget preferences.
• The new look for the Dashboard has seen a handful of tweaks, including a new button style that we’re trying out and, by popular demand, the “show all blogs” toggle is now sticky.
• The subscribe page element has been published to WWW.
• We’ve added a “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” to the Blogger…

Blogger blogs publish a site feed in Atom format. Atom feeds work in a very similar way to RSS, and there is very little difference for either publishers or those who choose to subscribe.

Default Blogger templates (and indeed, many third party templates), each page will feature a link to subscribe to the Atom feed. On the main pages, this will link to the main site feed, whereas on post pages, this will link to the comments feed for a particular post, like this:

Most blog readers are familiar with feeds…

Blogger’s comment system is quite different to that of other blogging services, and is not so “friendly” to regular readers who may not understand how this system works.

When faced with a default comment form, visitors to Blogger blogs may feel rather daunted and unwilling to participate in the conversation. However, there are many settings which Blogger authors can change which makes commenting more enticing for readers who are unfamiliar with the way Blogger comments work.

In this post, I’ll explain how you can alter your comment settings in Blogger to make…

Blogger have been busy working on some new features and updates to the system. Most notably, those logging in to Blogger in Draft (the testing area for new features) will notice a whole new look to the Blogger dashboard:

Using this dashboard allows us to see most of the features we need at a glance, including any news of scheduled outages and other service announcements.

The two blogs we have posted to most recently have their links displayed beside our profile images, offering easy access to post, layout and settings pages for these…