News from the Mother Ship

This week there has been some action behind the scenes at Blogger. This is from Blogger Buzz:

Today’s release brings a number of updates to Blogger:

1. Clearer identity options on the comment form, which now highlights some of the more popular OpenID providers more obviously.
2. Transliteration is now available in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu as well as Hindi
3. Posts with more than 200 comments have them split across multiple pages.
4. Layouts blogs now have a “Layouts” tab instead of “Template.
   

And this is from Blogger in Draft:

Bloggers often feature a list of their favorite blogs, called a “blogroll,” in the sidebar of their own blog. Our latest page element, Blog List, helps you do just that, but we’ve mixed it in with Google Reader to make it even more powerful and useful.

The Blog List writes all links out in HTML so that, unlike JavaScript-based blogrolls, you pass PageRank goodness on to the blogs you link to.

I also see in the Page Elements window a couple of other new offerings. Here is the new lineup:

1. Gadget: add one of the many Google Gadgets to your blog.
2. Blog List: Show off what you read with a blogroll of your favorite blogs.
3. Subscription Links: Let your readers easily subscribe to your blog with popular feed readers.
   

To find these new additions, you must access your dashboard through this link:
http://draft.blogger.com/