Blogger Gets New and Improved Features

Google’s Blogger has unveiled a bunch of new and improved features that are available immediately within their Blogger in Draft sandbox.

* Webmaster Tools Verification. Turn this on to automatically add and verify all your blogs on Google’s Webmaster Tools.

* Star ratings. Add a 0 – 5 star rating control to the bottom of your posts so that your readers can rate them.

* Import / export of blogs. Back up all of your posts and comments to one Atom XML file on your computer, and import your posts from one blog to another.

* Embedded comment form. By incredibly popular demand, we’ve brought the comment form to your blog’s post pages, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.

* New post editor. We’ve completely revised the post editor, bringing in drag-and-drop image placement and better HTML handling.

* 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 in Draft dashboard, so now you don’t have to remember to type “draft.blogger.com” instead of “www.blogger.com.”

* So you can easily keep up with the news, we’ve added this blog as a tab on the Blogger in Draft Dashboard.

Read more at Blogger in Draft.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.