Author Comments - Different Styles

Bloggers generally welcome constructive comments and feedback on their posts. Among the ways to encourage comments are to remove the “nofollow” tag and to add a Recent Comments widget into the template. Comments highlight issues that readers might have faced, and the author's reply to these comments may be useful to other readers as well. If you have many comments posted in your blog, it would

Flash Music Player and Music Playlists

In our earlier article, Add Music to Blogspot Blog, we talked about how music can be played in the background of the blog or through a hyperlink or music console player. Readers had requested for an option to play more than one song via a playlist. We have been looking at cross-browser music players that allow us to display a music playlist of selected musical pieces for Blog readers to listen

Submit Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com

We had explained how to submit Blogger sitemaps to Google and Yahoo!. When the sitemap industry standard was first announced in 2006, Microsoft's MSN was one of the three major search providers which supported the protocol. Submitting your Blog's sitemap to these search engines will enable them to index the pages and contents of the site. Needless to say, having all the pages indexed will

Recent Comments Feed Widget

We wrote earlier about creating Recent Comments and Recent Posts Widgets using Blogger's “Feed” page element. It was a simple method that even non-techie Bloggers can understand and use. In the middle of last month, Blogger did a major change to the GData API and many bloggers suddenly saw broken entries in their feed widgets. Although Blogger has tweaked the Feed widget to make this work

Custom Search for Salesforce Developers

Posted by: Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

I recently met with Adam Gross, VP of Developer Relations at Salesforce.com, to hear how developer.salesforce.com uses Google Custom Search. The company is building a community and knowledge base for developers on its Apex platform, and needs a search engine across a variety of content sites, including blogs and wikis. Adam says that Custom Search Business Edition is ideal for their needs, since it's easy to search multiple sites and access search results through an XML API. From the time he learned about Custom Search Business Edition, Adam says it only took a few days to install and create a look and feel for search results that matches the rest of the site.

To hear the story in Adam's own words, check out this video.

And if you're interested in hearing more about our work with Salesforce, we're at their Dreamforce conference this week, so come by to see us.

Technorati Tags in Blogger Posts

Technorati, which indexes some 94 million weblogs, allows blog owners to assign tags to their posts. These tags are essentially words which describe the category that the posts, photos and videos fall under. Visitors can then search these tags to find the relevant blog posts. How can the Technorati tags be inserted into Blogger posts so that they can be indexed by Technorati? Is there a need to

Better search results

Posted by Tom Duerig, Software Engineer

We've implemented two frequently-requested features that we think will improve the quality of results in your Custom Search Engine.

1. Keywords now have a much stronger effect on Custom Search results. This helps give better targeted results and more flexibility than before. You can change your search engine's keywords in the "Basics" tab of your search engine's control panel. If you don't like the effect that keywords have your search results, you can also remove them.

Compare the results on this yoga search engine when looking for a "mat" with and without the keyword "yoga" --

with keywords:
http://www.google.com/cse?q=mat&cx=005239880967462049052%3A412vkh_dcla

without keywords:
http://www.google.com/cse?q=mat&cx=005239880967462049052:mdwcyik6y9m

2. For the XML hackers, FILTER labels now are effected by scores and weights just like BOOST labels. This simplifies rearranging your search results so that the content you care about comes up first. In order to prioritize a set of pages, give annotations for those pages' higher scores.

Compare the results of using scores in this vision search engine to prioritize *.ucsd.edu/* over other schools.

with scores (XML definition):
http://www.google.com/cse?q=camera&cref=http://www.google.com/cse/samples/ucsdvision.xml

without scores (XML definition):
http://www.google.com/cse?q=camera&cref=http://www.google.com/cse/samples/ucsdvision-noscores.xml

As always, feel free to give us your feedback in the discussion group.

Blogger FAQ and Help Guide

In case you are not already aware, we have been addressing some of our readers' queries through our Tricks for New Bloggers blog. It all started with readers asking questions which are unique to their situations. While we tried to modify our articles to include those situations as well, it was a tall order trying to cover every possible permutation. So as not to disappoint our readers, we set

Submit Blog to Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at increasing the volume and improving the quality of traffic to a website from search engine results. Search engines work on different algorithms to analyze the contents and keywords, and present the search results. Google, for instance, assigns page ranks to the sites and sites that rank highly will appear early in the results. Of course, many other

Add or Remove Borders in CSS Templates

We have received a number of queries from people wanting to remove the image borders or add sidebar borders in the CSS layouts. In this article, we cover briefly what the border styles in CSS templates are and where you can find them. With this guide, you will be able to remove the borders around the images, sidebar or main posts, or change the style and color of the borders to match the Blog

Internet Security and Blogger Virus

The internet was abuzz with talk that Blogger.com site got hacked and was compromised. Blog owners suddenly found fake spam Posts in their Blogs which contained links to virus downloads and data mining sites. Some were faced with inexplicable web page load times and yet others noticed odd codes appearing in their templates. The natural reaction is to blame all these on the people responsible