Google has quietly been rolling out some upgrades to Blogger, its free, online blog-creating service. The improvements, which Google teased back in March, are significant: a new rich text editor, the ability to enable a mobile version of your blog, post-by-text functionality, and more.
However, not all Blogger bloggers can see the new additions. To get them, you have to visit Blogger in Draft, a kind of open beta (though Google isn't calling it a beta) that lets you use or turn on many of the new features before they are formally introduced.
Note that signing up for Blogger in Draft does not guarantee that you'll see all the improvements right away, although when I enrolled, I saw five or six changes within 24 hours.
Blogger Goes Mobile The first change I noticed is that Blogger now lets you enable a mobile-optimized, or "m-dot" version, of your sites. If you activate the feature, readers who land on your blog from a smartphone browser will see a much cleaner and easier-to-read mobile-optimized version of your blog. Mobile Blogger blogs have larger text and few photos, as well as a streamlined layout. Bloggers can preview how their sites will appear with a preview button that Blogger provides ( see the slideshow ), or by capturing a QR code, which launches the preview right on their phones. The mobile-optimized version of a blog puts posts in a vertically scrolling section on the mainstay of the screen, while reserving a strip at the top for links to Blogger "Pages."
The second change I saw in my Blogger account was the ability to create a blog post from a mobile device via text message. Users can register their smartphones by texting a code to a number that Blogger provides. It took me less than a minute to complete the instructions, and only a few minutes more before Google Blogger authenticated my iPhone.
Text and Email Blogger-ing Blog-by-text message and blog-by-email (also in Blogger) have been included in other free blogging platforms, such as Tumblr and Posterous, for some time now. It only makes sense that a major player like Google Blogger would keep pace with its competitors, especially in trying to win over some of the micro-blogging community, which seems to have caused demand for these features across platforms in the first place.
Viewer Customization Perhaps my favorite feature, which has been live for all since Google first announced that new features were coming soon, is called "dynamic templates." Dynamic templates transform any Blogger blog into a totally different design chosen by the reader rather than the blog creator. Type "/view" onto the end of any Blogger blog URL to see how it works. It's stunning.
WYSIWG (ish) A few hours after I first enrolled in the Blogger in Draft beta, even more improvements started popping up in my dashboard. A much-anticipated and highly overdue rich text editor has finally appeared. The new editor gives non-HTML-savvy users better control for placing and sizing photos, as well as a more clear command of how to adjust their text. It's not a perfect WYSIWYG editor, but it's close and is worlds better than Blogger's HTML editor—which is still available in a tab to give bloggers a choice in how they type.
Changes to image uploading options are drastically better, too. Previously, users could only upload images or link to them. Two new options—select an image that has already been uploaded to Blogger and select an image from the user's Google Picassa account—will create better workflow for Bloggers and will also decrease the number of duplicate images that Google stores.
All these changes, and perhaps more, will likely be available to all in the coming weeks, judging by information released by Google. To get more updates about the improvements before they roll out across all Blogger accounts, keep an eye on the Blogger in Draft blog.
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