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When we launched the Blogger Template Designer to Blogger in Draft in March, you gave us a lot of feedback and suggestions. Our blog post received nearly 1,000 comments and many of you shared your blog’s new looks on Twitter using #newbloggertemplate. Since the launch, we fixed many bugs and added even more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer has only been available on Blogger in Draft, which is why we’re excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer is now available to everyone.

Highlights

How you look online is important, and everybody wants to look unique. With the Blogger Template Designer, you can create your own blog designs through:

• Beautiful new templates. We’ve designed 19 brand-new templates, with more on the way. You can quickly give your blog a great new style by selecting one of the new templates.[1]
• Separating design from layout. Designs are completely defined in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), meaning that any design can be applied to any blog layout, making templates more flexible and unique.
• Hundreds of free, professional background images. We’ve paired up with iStockphoto to offer you hundreds of gorgeous background images at no cost.
• A single control to change all your design’s colors. With other platforms, users have to define every color in their blog separately, making changing the color theme of your blog a tedious task. The Blogger Template Designer lets you change all the colors in your blog at once, by changing the Main color theme.
• Pixel-perfect layout manipulation via smooth resizing. You can define your layout down to the pixel via sliders that update the blog’s preview in real time.
• A real-time preview sits below the design control panel. Watch your blog update as you create your template design.
• Keeping it simple. Throughout the Template Designer we use hierarchy to hide complexity from you.
• Complete control. Under the advanced tab, you can override a design’s CSS and enter your own CSS in the editor and see your blog’s preview updated in real time.
• Cross-browser support. Blogger handles cross browser support for you, so you don’t have to. Want a design with rounded corners? We give it to you in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.

Try it now!

Anyone can try out the template designer here. If you like your design, you can apply it to a new blog or to an existing blog. You can also try the Template Designer on your blog (Design > Template Designer).

Feel free to spread the word with the #newbloggertemplate hashtag on Google Buzz or Twitter. If you are a template designer, you are also welcome to join the Blogger Template Design Group.  If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know on the forums.

As always, thanks for using Blogger!

[1] Note: Selecting a new template will erase all of your customizations on the existing template, so if you have customized your template be sure to first save the current template at Design > Edit HTML.

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We’re working hard to make Blogger better and need your help. Sign up for a usability study and give us feedback on some exciting new ideas currently in development. These study results will help us better understand your needs and refine our features before they launch.

Interested? Sign up here.

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With a recent public launch under its belt, OpenSky is adding $6 million in new capital. Existing investors Highland Capital and Canaan Partners invested in the series B financing. A year ago, the company raised $5 million.

OpenSky is a social marketing/e-commerce startup which connects manufacturers and distributors directly with influential bloggers who recommend their products and get a cut from resulting sales. It is much more than an affiliate networks. As I described OpenSky when it launched:

While OpenSky sounds at first like an affiliate network, it isn’t. Instead of sending customers off to other online stores, they send them to their own stores where they can track sales and follow up with personalized messages. OpenSky hand picks the publishers who are allowed to set up shops and sell in its network. It then strikes deals directly with manufacturers and distributors who agree to drop-ship any sold items to readers who click to buy through an OpenSky shop. Instead of the blogger getting a 3 to 10 percent affiliate fee, they split the net profits 50/50 with OpenSky. The economics work best obviously with high-margin products.

OpenSky CEO John Caplan was previously the CEO of Ford Models, and before that the president of About.com. He tells me that “seller conversion rates grow and repeat shoppers buy more frequently” since the launch (before that, OpenSky was in private beta with 250 bloggers). His plans going forward include hiring more people, releasing a distributed cart (for onsite shopping without sending readers off to a store), opening up OpenSky’s APIs, improve the relevance matching between product manufacturers and bloggers/influencers, and better direct marketing support for sellers.

View full post on TechCrunch