An Official "Follow by Email" Gadget for Blogger (Easy set up for Feedburner Email Subscriptions)

Many blog readers prefer to receive updates of new posts by email (rather than subscribing in an RSS feed reader). To make it even easier for our readers to stay in touch with our sites, the Blogger Team have developed a new, official gadget: Follow by Email.

Using Feedburner technology, this new gadget offers a one-click solution for adding an email subscription form to our Blogger-powered blogs. We don't even need to sign up with Feedburner or visit the Feedburner dashboard to configure this for use in our sites!

Blogger's Forthcoming Features - New Dashboard, Post Editor, Content Discovery and more!

While 2010 was an exciting year for Blogger with the addition of the new Template Designer, Real-time stats and web fonts (to name a few of the features released), 2011 looks to be even more exciting.

At SXSW the Blogger team demonstrated two fabulous forthcoming features: an updated post editor and "content discovery". I can't begin to describe how much I'm looking forward to these new features!

Easy Post Summaries and Thumbnails for Blogger Blogs - No JavaScript Required!

The ability to display post summaries and automatic thumbnails is one of the most sought-after Blogger customizations. Using such a feature enables us to create a cohesive layout on non-item pages with the entire post and full-sized image on item pages.

Recent changes to Blogger's functionality now enables us to achieve this using only Blogger code - no need for JavaScript, awkward CSS customizations or restrictions on the length or format of our posts.

With only a few small changes to our Blogger template, we can display post summaries and thumbnails using this easy to manage hack.