Bringing G+ Comments to your Blogger blog without walling it off

We think it is awesome that +Blogger and +Google+ have started integrating more and more every day. The new commenting system brings additional engagement to any Blogger site as, if your readers are active in G+, it gets them sharing and discussing much more quickly. This will be a huge boon for those already active in G+, and might be an incentive for them to get started in Google+.

The only problem is that this new system is a bit of a "walled garden"... so we're aiming to fix that a bit.

Converting your Blogger blog posts into a Book

We're always up for a new challenge. This one was posed to us by +Ben Morrell who wanted to transform his blog into a book, or more simply a Word document that he could edit before shipping off to a printer. Sure, he could have gone and copy/pasted each blog post into Word, but his blog was started in 2002, having over 10 years of blog posts.

But we've managed to create this transformation process using tools that all bloggers likely have at their disposal.

Transforming a Blogger RSS feed into a slideshow

This tip was created by us to solve a challenge that one of our readers left for us on our Resizing your thumbnails in Blogger's Popular Posts widget post. Initially we decided to make take this challenge and transform Blogger's Popular Posts widget into a slideshow, but now we're going to show you how to transform ANY Blogger RSS feed into a slideshow and place it into a widget, or anywhere in your blog for that matter.

Transforming Blogger's Popular Posts widget into a slideshow

Why didn't we think of this sooner?!?!?

Most blogs on +Blogger take advantage of the Popular Posts widget in their blog, and to some extent, most people wish it could look better or do more. For instance, one of our earlier scripts was creating the ability to resize the popular post thumbnails so that they could be bigger without losing quality.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take that same, boring widget and turn it into a slideshow, using the thumbnails as a background image for the slides with the title and snippet displayed over top of the image?