How to use Google's Font API with Blogger

Web fonts have become a popular web design trend over recent months. As I explained in a previous post, the @font-face technique can be problematic when applied to Blogger templates. But since Google have now released their font API, we're able to display non-standard fonts in our Blogger templates with ease!

Here's an overview of the Google Font API and how we can use this to enhance our Blogger-based designs.

Better Post Previews - See how your post will look to readers

After a hardworking weekend, I found an awesome treat in my feed reader this morning! Blogger in Draft today published details of the enhancements to the post preview feature of our blogs which enables us to see how our posts will look to readers:

Up until now, when we preview a post we are writing for our Blogger powered blogs, we have seen only a white, format-less version of our musings, with none of the formatting and visual style which is added by our template and CSS.

With this new feature in place, we can see preview exactly what the post will look like when published, including any style attributes generated by our template code.

How to use non-standard fonts with Blogger

A question I'm asked a lot is how to use @font-face (or other font-replacement techniques) with Blogger.

Now I have to admit, after dozens of failed attempts, heavy experimentation and keyboard-bashing I was almost ready to give up on this and admit defeat.Most of the techniques I tried were either unreliable or simply did not work!

Luckily, @kernest and @abu_farhan came to my rescue via Twitter by pointing me in the direction of Kernest's free (and premium) font-based service.

Blogger Buster - Relaunched!

Those of you who have visited Blogger Buster over the past few weeks will have noticed gradual changes to the site, complete with a countdown timer to the date of relaunch.

Several weeks in the making (and still with a few tweaks to finalize), Blogger Buster's new look is finally unveiled:

Blogger Buster eBooks - Updated Links

As many Blogger Buster readers have reported, the links to download my eBooks had become corrupted during my extended hiatus.

Today I have uploaded both The Blogger Template Book and The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger templates to Google Documents, a relocation I hope will prove far more reliable than my previous hosting solution!

I've updated the download links for these eBooks and hope everyone can now read and download these resources without any problems.

Declaring Email Bankruptcy

After leaving my inbox virtually unchecked for the past six months, I'm declaring email bankruptcy.

If you've sent me an email before today and are not a family member or colleague, you may want to send it again.

Blogger Buster is starting over, and anything you send now should get through to my new Gmail powered (and hopefully, spam-free) set-up.

I have literally hundreds of unopened mail in my inbox (which would take weeks to sort through), and feel that declaring email bankruptcy is the only fair method to deal with this in lieu of a new start for the site. My sincerest apologies for anyone inconvenienced by this decision.

80+ Hand-Picked Beautiful and Original Blogger Designs

Customizing our Blogger blogs is now easier than ever. Aside from the hundreds of pre-made templates available for us to simply upload to our sites, there are innumerable tutorials helping us design more beautiful and interesting sites. Yet some Blogger users look beyond these simpler design features to construct stunning original Blogger designs.

Over at We Love Blogger, you can find a daily showcase of inspiring Blogger-based designs. Here are the cream of the crop: more than 80 Blogger-powered blogs of unusual design or outstanding quality, provided as a feast of inspiration for your own projects.

Help! My Template Disappeared!

As many of you may now realize, I've been on a somewhat lengthy hiatus...

Unfortunately in my absence, one of my websites used for hosting older templates and related images has disappeared! This means that many of you currently using these templates now find them unusable, or downright ugly.

Luckily, I've managed to find an old backup CD which includes most of these templates and I'm now in the process of updating them.

Unfortunately, the backup CDs are mostly corrupted. I'm unable to access the images used for these files in order to update the templates.

The templates affected by this issue are:

• Sunset
• Girly Web 2.0
• Magical - Now updated - see below
• Sweet Dreams (all versions)

If by any chance any Blogger Buster readers still have the original Zip files or images (and would be willing to send these over) please do get in touch!

I'm truly truly sorry for those affected by this problem and will endeavor to do all I can to retrieve and update these older templates wherever possible.

I'll update this post regularly with details of any templates I am able to update with links to the updated files. Please let me know if you're experiencing issues with a template not listed here so I can attempt to resolve all problems as soon as possible