Blogger just celebrated its ten year anniversary, and promised that a lot of goodness would start popping up in the gadgets section. That’s good news, since Blogger’s gadgets section pretty much sucks. Change is on its way, mostly thanks to Bloggerbuster: Bloggerbuster specializes in building Blogger gadgets, and shares tips on customizing your Blogger experience. Thanks to this third-party developer, Blogger now has a decent library of gadgets with elegant designs:
Recent posts, recent comments, Twitter updates, Twitpic updates, Flickr updates, Picasa updates, Google Calendar event-sharing, and my personal favorite that I still need to figure out a way to best use it: Twitter personalized real-time updates. Bloggerbuster is not Blogger’s only blessing. With a little digging in the gadgets directory, I found a Friendconnect/Reader/Blogger powered gadget that I just have to share here: The ‘blog list’ gadget.
The Blog list enables you to “show off what you read with a blogroll of your favorite blogs”. In the gadget settings, to add your friends’ blogs, you can enter the blogs by their url, or you can select from the list of blogs you follow through Google Friendconnect:
Tell me this isn’t the easiest way to build a blogroll! The only flaw is that nobody uses Friendconnect to follow blogs because nobody understands yet how it works. Say no more, if you do not use Friendconnect, but have a Google Reader account, you can also select blogs from the blogs you are subscribed to:
Once you created a blogroll, it generates a folder in your Google Reader that track the feeds from the blogs in the blogroll. Quite interesting!