Blogger has recently rolled out its latest official gadget: Follow By Email that allows authors to give their readers the option of receiving notifications about newly published content directly in their inbox.
There are several other official gadgets (widgets) offered by Blogger that are not only incredibly easy to add to a blog, but also adds value to it. Of course there are numerous third-party gadgets available as well that are usually bit more fancy than what Blogger has to offer, but if you are one of those bloggers who likes to keep it simple then these gadgets are just what you might be looking for.
In order to add these gadgets to your blog visit Blogger Dashboard and click on Design, in Page Elements click on Add a Gadget.
GADGETS
Email Subscription
Follow By Email is the latest addition by Blogger through which author can let readers receive notifications of the latest updates from a blog directly through emails. Readers will receive emails of newly published posts with a link directing towards the original post on the blog. Through FeedBurner, this gadget tracks the number of subscribers, daily views and other subscription information as well.
Popular Posts
A very essential widget to a blog that tracks your most popular posts and lets you display them on your blog as per your liking. You can choose to most popular posts from past week, month or from the time your blog started. It helps in increasing page views and keeps the reader hooked on to your site for a longer period of time, thereby reducing bounce rate.
Blog Stats
You can show-off total number of pageviews of your blog through this widget. You can choose to display pageviews from past week, month or all time. Please note that this widget connects with Blogger Stats feature that has not always been a part of Blogger, therefore it calculates pageviews from the time when Stats was first introduced with Blogger (1st July 2010).
Video Bar
It goes without saying that video blogging can do wonders to your blog, you can add tutorials, about us videos, demo videos or just-for-fun videos. Including videos to your homepage is practise followed by many bloggers and has proven to be quite a success, through this video bar widget you can add a channel to your blog or as per keywords. It is advisable to create your own channel on YouTube, add or upload your favorite videos there and display it on your blog through this widget.
Picasa Photostream
This gadget is perfect for those who run a photography blog, travel blog, food blog or anyone who shares his/her life through photographs on Blogger. All you need is Picasa photostream and include that stream to your blog through this widget. You can choose the size of images and also the number of images with a link to your Picasa public album. For those who prefer Flickr, can find a similar Flickr photostream gadget as well.
Twitter Updates
A very popular and highly effective widget that links to your Twitter account. All you need to do is include your Twitter username and choose the number of tweets to be displayed in the gadget; you can also include a link to your Twitter page.
Recent Posts
Many bloggers prefer to display their most recent posts rather than most popular or related posts, through this gadget you can display your most recent posts on your blog's homepage. You can customize the size of this gadget in accordance to your blog, and choose the number of posts to be displayed along with the number of characters that you wish to include in the summary along with the title of the post.
Recent Comments
Another gadget recommended by many bloggers that helps in increasing interaction within your blog and also gives a positive impression that the author recognizes opinions, feedbacks or inputs provided by his/her readers. Like other gadgets, this one also lets you customize as per your liking; you can choose the number of comments to be displayed and the summary below it.
Please Note: First four widgets in this post (email subscription, popular posts, blog stats and video bar) are gadgets created by Blogger, whereas the last four (Picasa, Twitter updates, recent posts and recent comments) are featured gadgets by Blogger. You can find all these gadgets/widgets by clicking on 'Add a Gadget' in Design (Page Elements) section of your blog.
We hope that you found some of these gadgets to be useful for your blog, if you know of some more interesting and effective gadgets, then do share them with us and our readers in the comments section below.
If you wish to learn about more useful resources like this for your blog, then do join us and let us bring them to you. You can subscribe to our RSS feed or join us on Facebook and Twitter.
While looking for the details on "Follow by Email" gadget of Blogger, landed here. Nice stuff!
BTW, I've not yet implemented "Follow by Email" gadget, does the subscribers of it will be reflected to the pageviews stats supplied by the blogger for my blog?
I'm very new to blogging and have a blog of 2-3 months old, hope to return to this site soon to see more stuff..........
Best wishes, keep the good work going....
Thanks & Regards
Swapan Das
While looking for the details on "Follow by Email" gadget of Blogger, landed here. Nice stuff!
BTW, I've not yet implemented "Follow by Email" gadget, does the subscribers of it will be reflected to the pageviews stats supplied by the blogger for my blog?
I'm very new to blogging and have a blog of 2-3 months old, hope to return to this site soon to see more stuff..........
Best wishes, keep the good work going....
Thanks & Regards
Swapan Das
Thanks for the very informative post, i also liked a lot the post on 9 hidden gems that every blogger must dig. I would like to know is there is a way to customize the subscribe by e-mail widget? my blog is www.dish-away.com and i want to customize the subscribe by having the font "not caps" plus having a boarder around the widget box to make it stand-out and draw attention? is there an easy way to do that?
For subscribe buttons you can try choosing from icons available on FindIcons.com. It's quite easy to use, you can learn more about it here: http://www.e-junkie.info/2010/10/perfect-search-engine-for-icons.html. We hope this helps. :)