For as long as I can remember, since when I started blogging, I have always been using blogger. Although, there were times when I switched platforms (like wretch) for their communities, in the end, like a bird, I still return to my nest, blogger.

Through so many years, blogger with google has been improving the virtual life for bloggers and many times its really due to ideas and support from the online community. So just recently, actually mid last year, blogger launched a something new to test out ideas which could be implemented in the future.

If you have not been blindly using blogger, and have been exploring around blogger like me, you would have noticed that, occasionally, at the bottom of your dashboard you would have noticed that there would be new features churning out. Before these are implemented, they are tested at Blogger in Draft.


At first look, there does not seemed to be much difference except the top banner. However, further usage will discover some differences. Here are some nice features:

Google Gadgets
If you click add elements on your sidebar and browse through it in 2 seconds letting out a sigh, "is that all?" every time you edit your layout, fret not, google gadget is here! If you are familiar with igoogle and have been using it to build webpages, you would already know how much gadgets they have in there. So now, what happen is, blogger can now exploit the use of these gadgets too. Since they convert the gadgets for blogger use, there would be literally thousands of gadgets and it would be more of a headache now, choosing the appropriate one for your blog!

Search box
This is pretty nice feature to have for people who has lots of information in their past archive but are lazy or do not know how to add a search box. With this, its possible to still have page loads as it enable those past post to be found. For those who already have, or are using google adsense for the search box, I am not too sure if it actually connects with adsense at all. Anyway, besides, it having no customization of colors or fonts, etc. it still work pretty well. So lets just wait for blogger to update this feature again. To add, just click "add gadget" and you will see it there.

Blog list
Gone are the days where people connect to one another by just putting a small little link on their sidebars. Even this have evolved and changed. With this new feature, Blog List, you now not only display links of your favourite blogs, but also have the option of having the date of the blog’s last update or even the title and snippet of its most recent post. All this is possible just by adding the atom or rss feed of the blog. Easy?

Scheduled Posts
Sometimes, when you write a blog post but realize that you do not want to publish it right away, so you save it to draft and publish it later. For these times, you can actually rely on "Scheduled Posts" to help you publish in the future. This means that you can just set a future date in the post options that you would like to have it published, and blogger would wait till its the day to publish it. This is different in the past when no matter what date you set, it gets publishes anyway.To un-schedule a post, simply save it as a draft any time before it gets published.

These are some feature that you might see in blogger, but currently they are already being tested by other bloggers who use them and return feedbacks. So if you can't wait, or are adventurous to discover more about blogger "beta" go now to blogger in draft and visit their blog here.

These are some features churned out from blogger in draft that you might already be familiar with:

• Polls
• Video Upload
• Enclosure Links
  
• OpenID Provider
• OpenID Commenting