Earlier this week, we announced support for Gadgets inside Blogger. I've been a bit too busy to blog about it, but it's worth a special mention. There's a gadget directory, which pulls content from iGoogle's directory. OpenSocial gadgets can work as well, if you make the social APIs optional (Optional feature="opensocial-0.8"); other than that, the JS API is the same as for Orkut and OpenSocial containers. Will Blogger get social? Wait and see...
Another cool Blogger draft feature is the one I'm trying out right now, a new post editor. This one is based on the same technology as Google Docs, meaning a smoother experience and faster iterations in the future.
For me personally, one particularly nice thing is to be able to 'fix' the compose settings so that the editor doesn't try to interpret <b>angle brackets</b> <entry>of any kind</entry> as active markup. If you need to talk about XML and HTML, this is kinda important :). This is available under "Post Options".
We just released a bunch of updates for Blogger, including many draft features (see Update and Bug Fixes for June 26th). One draft feature which is particularly cool is inline comments. These will hopefully make it easier and faster to leave a comment. I've enabled it on this blog; there are a few usability issues remaining to be worked out but we're iterating on them as I type. Go Blogger team!
We've officially, at long last, announced OAuth availability for all Google data APIs, including Blogger's AtomPub. Which will hopefully get Tim Bray off my back: Look, standard auth!
Extremely cool, and shows off some of the basic Blogger APIs that are available (either via AtomPub or GDataJS). The samples run in your web page and you can edit them in-line to play with the Blogger APIs. Nice!
Image from WikipediaI've been falling behind! Blogger recently graduated OpenID from "draft", which is sort of like beta but more bloggery. What this means:
Cool: Blogger has been nominated for the "Best Web Application for Weblogs" category in the 2008 Bloggies. Parenthetically, PostSecret has already run away with the "Blog Nominated in the Most Categories" category, which is great because (a) it's awesome and (b) it's on BlogSpot, so if it wins we all bask in reflected glory. Or something.
Yesterday, in addition to launching Blogger in three new languages, we pushed out a draft feature: Your blog is your OpenID. Technically, this means that Blogger is both an OP and an RP; we've accepted OpenID signed comments since December.
We've implemented OpenID 1.1 so far, so we should be compatible with all OpenID 1.1 RPs. Please test it out (see instructions for opting in) and let us know if you see problems.
It's also great to see Yahoo announcing that they'll be an OpenID 2.0 Provider. I hope they implement RP support soon too, at least for things like Flickr comments.
I'll be at IIW next week, talking about Blogger, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and anything else that seems interesting. I'm anticipating a great event.
We've just enabled OpenID signed comments for Blogger in Draft. There are a few rough edges still (which is why you have to enable it for your blog by going to draft.blogger.com), so we're looking for feedback. We're also working on enabling Blogger as an OpenID Provider, meaning that you can use your blog URL to identify yourself on other services.
What's particularly fun about this is that it's been a very collaborative project, bringing together Blogger engineers, 20% time from a couple of non-Blogger engineers, and last but not least some of the fine open source libraries provided by the OpenID community. Thanks all!
