Inbox: Blogger Wishlist Contest from BloggerBuster

Blogger Buster has announced a new competition for Blogger bloggers. (If you don't use Blogger to create your blog, you might want to skip reading this. I won't mind.) The purpose of the contest is to collect a list of the features you'd like to see in Blogger that will improve your blogging experience. For instance, Amanda of Blogger Buster starts with adding a comment form right beneath the posts and a better selection of templates to use. Clicking on the graphic above will take you to a full explanation of the contest.

I've used Blogger Buster extensively for the tips and tricks on modifying the Blogger templates I chose for both A Bumpy Path and eyebald. One of the very first modifications I made was showing a portion of my post with a "continue" link on the front page of my blogs. I agree with Amanda that this should be a standard feature.

I also agree that having a comment form right on the post page would encourage much more comments, as trying to find the comment link, then going to a page that does not match in look and feel can be daunting for many blog readers.

I would like to see the ability to create static pages that are not considered and treated as posts. An About, Contact, and Archive page with the ability to link to these pages from the header would save a lot of manual tweak time.

It would also help to have a ready-made archive page with editable regions for additional explanations.

I would really, really like the option to post an image at the size of the uploaded image. Small, medium and large just doesn't cut it for me. Add a little note about the size of the content region if you have to, just give me the option to present my images in the orginal size!

I like Blogger. Finding workarounds to use the features I like in other blogging platforms is not a big deal for me since I am comfortable editing XML, HTML and CSS, but I doubt many others are. I really like that my posts show up in Google searches almost immediately. It is that reason alone that has kept me from migrating to another blogging service.