Blogger.com wishlist - common requests categorised and described

Blogger.com is an essential tool for us. Therefore I took the time to read all current 750 plus ideas and requests. And I found many recurring themes often using different words and ways to describe very similar functions or features. This post tries to filter and describe the most common requests and ideas.

The following list is not a thorough aggregation of topics. Some categories might better be embedded in others. The list is not "in order" or implies a ranking. The numbers are for reference only...

BTW if you like my Ideas for Blogger.com compilation please don't forget to vote here!

1. favicon - possibility to upload / create / link to different favicon (the tiny icon to the left of the URL address field in the browser. The favicon is also used for browser tabs and RSS readers)
2. Comment features 
1. threaded comments / reply to comment
2. integration with other "social" commenting services like Facebook, Twitter, Disqus
3. some would like a discreet comment function which allows readers to use the comment as contact form
4. Look and Feel - ability to place form above comments, ability to change the display format
5. Integration of Google Groups as a forum (and vice versa why not use blogger as the Google Groups front-end for appearance. Also why not syndicate posts as well, IE offer the possibility in a Google Thread to publish contents as a blog post)
6. rating of comments - similar to youtube?
7. avoid accidental duplication by commenter (happens to everyone, hitting submit twice :-))
8. allow editing of comments (maybe transparently to user/visitor with email notification for typos, links etc)
9. email notification for commenter when reply has been posted
3. My Profile
1. adapting it to blog content and purpose, for example personal and business or theme of blog.
2. Optionally combine the Blogger Profile with the Google Profile
4. Handling and Appearance of Photos
1. more size and placement options
2. incl shadow and border independantly of template scheme. 
3. Uploading and management of pics with less restrictions, better photo URLs and tighter integration with Picasa. 
4. Handling of links to zoom the image as well as link to related content (external URL)
5. some would like to disable downloading (we do not agree, at least this shouldn't be a priority, as photos in a blog are public, so workarounds of downloading prevention measures are easy to do)
5. Social Following / Linking 
1. Make it possible to add other service icons to the bottom of the blog
2. stats of links
3. Friend Connect and Followers
4. better integration with Feedburner and RSS tools, visible backlinks etc...
5. more visitor (social) participation -  for tags, thumbs up or down, grading and rating....
6. Post dashboard / post editor
1. dashboard for management of posts should be centralised / aggregated for all blogs of a user (and among blogger communities)
2. integration with Google Docs / Google Apps for contributors (who won't need the blogger dashboard) that would allow for photo handling, tables, word count, mathematical formulas, table of contents / anchor links within the post etc
3. some would like a Latex integration (more requests, than one would assume :-)) 
7. Sharing labels / tags
1. across blogs, twitter, Facebook, Google Docs / Apps (posting docs as blogger articles with labels)
2. Email labels, so that Mail2Blogger can include tags, myabe in the posterous way with double-brackets in the subject line ((tags: news, fun))
8. Additional Access Level - add authors to a post which would be similar to an additional generic "editor" access. 
9. Better blog syndication - many bloggers have more than one blog, many blogs have more than one author. Many bloggers would like easier and better handling
1. such as cross-posting - allow simultaneous posting to more than one blog with ONE post. That kind of cross-posting is frequent for official Google blogs. 
2. Optionally set one blog as the main post, the other posts are referring posts with link.
3. Commenting should be syndicated as well (see comments above). 
4. Very important - the cross-post should be editable as ONE post, no need to edit all posts individually.
5. Posting management -  central management incl integration with Google Apps / Doc would allow easier access for contributors who don't need . And of course it would be nice to include at least a generic editor level (per post as well as per blog, see above)
6. Style management for corporate blogs - again a case for a Google Apps integration
7. Syndication / forwarding with external services - Ping.fm functionality, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr posting, Apple Apps Store, Android appstore
8. Multi-lingual support for posts published in different languages (again Google Docs plus sticky label for each language used)
9. Google Wave-like features (again, best through Google Docs/ Apps integration)
10. Google Sites - integrate wiki functionality into Blogger (maybe Google Docs Wiki) , and Blogger into Google Sites regarding blog capabilities
11. PubSubHubbub feature
12. being able to mix private and public posts in a blog
10. more font options (editor, CSS)
11. CSS and template designer
1. make templates "savable" , so that additional 3rd party templates or the users customisations don't get lost
2. background image handling not just for upload images, including URL for external hosting
3. saving customisations without having to apply them to the blog
4. improve template header options for fonts and photos, size, position, width...
5. CSS options like transparency and colour options for ALL page elements
6. reusable color schemes for different templates, applying pre-configured color scheme to a template
7. possibility to add background images to share with others
8. possibility to share designs / layouts / templates
12. additional mobile templates
1. each template has a separate simpler mobile look
2. mobile CSS settings / handling
13. table handling
1. maybe button for adding tables, a table wizard (though a tighter integration with Google Docs / Apps would solve that issue)
14. Search Engine Optimisation SEO
1. maybe through META gadget
2. label integration as keywords
3. better page rank features (ironically a common remarkt is that Google's blogger is less SEO friendly than Wordpress.com, therefore Blogger.com blogs are less well indexed and ranked in searches)
15. Navbar features - Blogger's navbar (not the menu navigation for pages)
1. more options for themes of blogs regarding next blog etc
2. some would like to make it disappear (there are easy hacks, but...)
3. some would like to have a mouse-over slide in
16. Better backup
1. automated download
2. download posts in text format (not as xml)
17. Print, PDF, ebook features for visitors - most commonly requested are PDF / ebook feature as a button to either load the entire blog into PDF or ebook format, or the post.
18. Link management 
1. Open URL in new page - often asked and simple (though not on the list of my top requests)
2. Add direct link to posts / pages within the editor
3. Permalink option
4. Links from images
19. mobile blogger apps for iPhone, iPhone and Android (fewer requests for Blackberry)
20. Sticky post, featured article, recommended posts, my favorite posts, homepage and pages - we believe that this would be best provided using a gadget "selected posts" where the user can select pages and posts displayed in that gadget. Also page elements and gadgets should include a "display" condition (read this post)
1. manual selection
2. selection based on label
3. display options for number of posts, thumbnail, date, author, snippet length, full length of post...
4. slideshow option
5. conditional gadgets for page elements and within gadgets
21. Calendar gadget - there are a few, but usually pre-2010, undistinguishable (seemingly similar gadgets) and unusable
1. Google Calendar (allowing for Blogger adaption in theme colours, size etc)
2. Google Calendar to post (for example public calendar entries as event blog posts for example)
3. Use the Calendar layout for blog archive display option
22. Gadget handling
1. community rating (also to flag dodgy ones)
2. better selection interface
3. more options for photos, gallery (better selection options) and video gadgets (for example load playlist of youtube user) 
23. Google Maps Gadget for imrpoved mapping features within posts as well as page element
24. Navigation menu bar (see my additional post)
1. dropdown features
2. more customisation by combining link list and pages..)
25. Labels and categories
1. second level labels like wordpress categories
2. clustering of labels by theme
3. let visitors add tags (for example by aggregating backlink tags, or tagging from public bookmark shares)
4. adding stackoverflow.com type tag features / rating and weighting tags
26. Gadgets within posts/ pages
1. would allow for sitemap on a page, or pages with label clouds, 
2. maybe even mindmap like sitemap
3. Mostly useful for pages, but gallery, Google calendar (for events and bookings) and poll gadgets for posts are very useful as well.

A few notes on the new editor
Interestingly, the request section dedicated to the updated editor lists many requests which basically say, that the new editor is not as good as the old one. I disagree with those comments. My different experience is maybe due to the old editor's browser and OS dependence. I am using Ubuntu and mainly Chrome. Yes, the image options are a little less flexible, but I am sure that this will soon be fixed.

Other than the copy paste annoyance, the editor seems far more stable.

If you copy and paste within the post, the "past" includes a META tag which the editor doesn't like and complains about. Currently, the only way to fix that is to switch to the HTML mode and delete the meta tag(s). For longer texts, I use the "find and replace" of the browser.

My little bug fix wish is that default paste is parsed to plain text. Only as an option should "paste" include rich formatting.

Please check out all my idea contributions for blogger.com :-)

Blogger.com Wishlist - More Flexibility and Options for the Navigation Menu

The "Pages" and the "Link List" gadgets allow you to create a menu bar when you place those gadgets. That's a big improvement since the introduction of the new template designer, because from then on, those menu bars have been integrated into the templates. Therefore once these gadgets are "added" to your blog, you can change the look and feel of the bar itself, the "buttons" and the font.

In the context of using Blogger.com for more than "pure" blogging and to make the menu bar much more usable and flexible, here are our wishes:

1. combine the Pages and Link List options, so that the menu bar links can point to pages as well as  configurable URLs
2. although technically, once that combination is possible, one could include the URL with the Label Search, for most users it would be great to include pre-configured choices, like
• home (including the option to insert an image as logo on the menu bar)
• pages
• labels
• posts
• enter link URL
• search element (the search field is often nicely 
3. last but not least, drop-down menus would be great, 
• freely configurable or
• if the top link is selected as label, the sub-menu could include up to 7 (?) laets or selected posts and the last sub-link for "more".

The drop-down element could be included as an additional "menu" element, same functionality as the normal menu bar element, just nested in to the main menu bar...

Step 4 - Creating a Blogger navigation menu

In principle, this is an easy fix.  You create a bunch of pages you want to link to, you create "room" for that navigation bar, you linkt the "buttons" to the pages. But...
That's ok if you don't share the site with others. because if you need a CMS to collaborate on publishing and design, well you need to dig a bit deeper.
The best soltion I have found so far is the bloggertuts tutorial by Dante Araújo.  Not only do you create a menu based navigation, but you also allow your power-users to edit the link list without editing the main CSS / HTML of the template.  Dante has cleverly solved that by combining the code for the menu with the link-list Blogger-gadget.  You can check it out on here.

Until I found his solution, the menu navigation was more a quick-fix, a workaround which needed design administrators to hack the core code. Not bad, but not elegant enough to care for the power users that a good CMS need to cater for.

Besides the elegant collaboration function, Dante's process solves another frequent Blogger menu problem.  Web visitors are used to get feedback from menus when hovering and clicking on the links, or "buttons".  Using a CSS javascript code of a typical menu, in Blogger that functionality works fine.  What doesn't work is the current page highlight once a link has been selected.  Blogger is a publishing system and "method" which needs to be included in the code of the navigation bar.  Dante solves that by using the ".current" class variable.

Of course you can use visual tricks in order to produce a similar effect for the user without  using the ".current" setting, but this is neat and elegant.

Other tips can be found on Amanda's BloggerBuster site, a great resource and on woork.blogspot.com (which has now moved to woorkup.com) X has great examples of nice and tidy menu navigation which can can use.  I recommend using Dante's method to "migrate" and adapt them for your Blogger site.