Altered Notebook · Amazon Associates · Blogger · Etsy

New Blogger Features

As some of my fellow bloggers may be aware, Blogger has made some changes lately. With this change to Blogger in Draft, I was able to redesign my garden blog. I can now add pages to my blog, something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time. Back in December (yes, I’m a bit behind in Blogger news) Blogger added a new way to monetize blogs. Amazon Associates allows me to search Amazon for products I’m writing about, and link to them without having to open a new tab or leave my blog post. The other neat feature is that I can choose to have Amazon turn the text into a link, insert an image that acts as a link, or insert a link and an image. If you purchase the item I blog about, (or any item after following my link) I will earn a small commission.

If you want to keep up with new Blogger features, subscribe to their blogs. They have one for Blogger, and one for Blogger in Draft. If you don’t want to add yet another blog to your reader, go to ‘edit notifications’ (next to the profile picture in your Dashboard) and check the box to receive emails about Blogger features and updates. I will be trying out some other Blogger features, and will do my best to keep you updated about any changes I make to my blog.

Ironically, after writing an entire post about linking to Amazon products, I have not linked to any Amazon product. Not to worry, though, my next post should have a few links. Meanwhile, I added four new altered notebooks/journals to my Etsy shop and apparently forgot to blog about it!

http://www.etsy.com/etsy_mini.jsnew EtsyNameSpace.Mini(5529017, ‘shop’,’thumbnail’,1,4).renderIframe();

Blogger · Comments

Comments

Blogger has been making ‘improvements’, and made a terrible mess of the comment feature. I was completely unaware of this until chigiy at The Gardeners Anonymous Blog wrote a post complaining about it.
I have changed the comment setting to ‘registered users’ It allows anyone with a Google/Blogger, AOL/AIM, LiveJournal, TypeKey, or WordPress account to leave a comment. There’s also an OpenID option for blogs not hosted by any of the above. The downside to this ‘feature’ is that anonymous comments are not allowed. I’ll be emailing blogger about this, but in the meantime, I’m going to add an e-mail me button so those of you without blogs can contact me.

EDIT: In playing around a little more, I discovered that the ‘anyone’ option has OpenID and allows anonymous comments. I guess I won’t have to email blogger after all!

~Sarah