It's been a few weeks since we looked at The 30 Best Free WordPress Themes Of 2012.Now it's time to see the Best Blogger Templates released this year.We are well past the half way stage of the year and as always Blogger Template Designers have been hard at work.They are of course all Free Blogger Templates and you can click the name of each to get the demo and download details.
Google are really playing for keeps with their latest venture into social networking; Google+.From using it to break news for their various products, making it an integral part of their search results, +1 on AdSense units and a real push to integrate it into blogs hosted on Blogger.
This week we gave away a freebie set of 3D Social Icons with names, the social icons set was very popular with almost 500 downloads in 3 days ! At the time of writing I am using these Icons here on Spice Up Your Blog.I have the icons in the sidebar linked to our Social Profiles and Feeds, however I have added a few effects to the icons.The main effect and I have received a lot of comments and Emails on this is Css rotate.With the Css rotate when you place your cursor over each icon they spin 360 degrees, they then spin back 360 when the cursor is removed (Cool eh).I also have a slight opacity hover effect on the icons.So in this post I will show you how to add the icons to your blog, linked to your social profiles and feeds.
The Blogger Navbar, when I first started Blogging it was somewhat of an issue.The issue wasn't is there a way to remove it, there were lots of tutorials showing how to remove the Blogger navbar.No the issue was "Are we allowed to remove the Blogger Navbar?".Many at the time feared removal could be against Blogger TOS and therefore end up in blogs being removed or accounts being closed.Blogger were always quiet on the issue but as there was never a story of a blog being effected because of removing the navbar we presumed it was OK.
Bloggers are always using images and photos on their blogs so in this post we will see how you can add five different effects to those images.The neat thing about this is you just have to add some jQuery and Css to your template (We make it easy) then you can easily add from 5 hover effects to add some spice to your blog images.
A few weeks back Blogger added a permalink feature to Blogger In Draft, Blogger In Draft is like a separate dashboard they use to test new features.You may have seen some Blogger related sites write about the permalink feature at the time.I held off covering the topic until the permalnk feature was added to the main dashboard.OK, If your thinking 'Test Dashboard' and 'Main Dashboard' what's he talking about, don't worry that's not important.The main point is every blogger user can now choose the URL for their posts.This leads to the next question 'What Is A Permalink?'.
A few months back Blogger introduced a system were by Blogs using the blogspot sub domain would redirect to a country code Top Leval Domain (ccTLD) depending on which country a visitor viewed the blog from.
Google are working astonishingly hard to push their new(ish) social network Google+.One of the features they have implemented is the option to connect your Google+ Profile to your blog.This will in turn verify you as the author of the blog which has some advantages.Possibly the main advantages is your Google+ profile will be displayed beside your blogs on search results.
Guest Post - Our host is Deepak Kamat, In this post he walks you through how to add a fixed jump to comments button on Blogger blogs.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.
A friend had asked me for help implementing some social icons using a sprite technique she had seen a tutorial for on Rob Cubbon's blog.I came to her aid and the result was great and using sprites has some advantages.By using a sprite image we can easily display the icons in black and white they then change to color on hover.Also we only use one image instead of 14 which helps with the load speed of your blog.It worked so well I decided to provide the tutorial for all our readers.Once added to your Blogger sidebar it will display icons for Google +, Your Rss Feed, Email Feed, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. 
There have been a number of knock on effects to the recent addition of Threaded comment replies on Blogger.Basically some of the features that were available to the now old comment from no longer work or don't work in the same way.One of the things that changed since the addition of threaded comment reply option on Blogger is the 'Comment Form Message'.The comment form message for those not familiar with it is a message you can add above the comment from.Many bloggers used this to display some comment rules or a thanks for commenting message.
Many blogs have multiple blog authors and would be classed as community blogs.If you have a community blog or would just like to invite friends and family to your blog and give them access to publish posts on Blogger it couldn't be easier.On Blogger you can add up to 100 authors to a blog and you also have two levels of access you can give to authors.Firstly you can give author access, this will give the invited author access to write and publish posts only.Secondly you can give Admin access, this gives the invited author complete access to your blog.
The ability to reply to comments on Blogger was probably the most sought after feature from Blogger users from many years.This year when the Blogger team delivered with the new Threaded comments with replies the response was obviously very positive.However the new comment format has brought with it some problems as some previous changes you may have made to your comment section may have been lost and moreover future changes would need to be coded differently.So for those of you that may have lost some of the styles you added or if you just want to add some style to lets face it what is a fairly basic looking comment section in this post i have 3 different color coded styles you can easily add to your blogger comments.Also check out the Speech Bubble Style Threaded Comments For Blogger we published in April. The ability to reply to comments on Blogger was probably the most sought after feature from Blogger users from many years.This year when the Blogger team delivered with the new Threaded comments with replies the response was obviously very positive.However the new comment format has brought with it some problems as some previous changes you may have made to your comment section may have been lost and moreover future changes would need to be coded differently.So for those of you that may have lost some of the styles you added or if you just want to add some style to lets face it what is a fairly basic looking comment section in this post i have 3 different color coded styles you can easily add to your blogger comments.Also check out the Speech Bubble Style Threaded Comments For Blogger we published in April. 
