The labs have been silent since 7/25/05, but Google seems to be waking up on the blog front. Recently they released their first beta iteration of their Blog Search which is pretty rough IMO still, and now they are shining their own blogger by making it a snap to add Google Adsenseto Blogger-based blog.

Blogger Buzz:

And we’ve added a tool for inserting the ads in your blog (so you don’t have to mess around with the HTML). There’s even built-in options that will analyze the colors on your blog and choose a recommended color scheme.

My experience
First I signed into our Adsense account through blogger. The first time it didn’t like my Adsense credentials, but I recopied/pasted and all worked well. Call that one user sausage fingers on the keyboard.

Once inside, I noticed that it added the Adsense code automatically to my embarassingly out of date Gmail Talk blogspot hosted blog, which site meter shows is down to about 11 visitors a day — woohoo! That’s what happens when a blog isn’t updated for 90 days. What can I say, I haven’t been using Gmail very much for the last 90 days, so there hasn’t been much for me to “talk” about.

In order to find the Adsense section, I had to click the “Template” tab and then choose “AdSense” (in the middle). I noticed the JavaScript was a little buggy in activating the custom window to enter in the background color, link color, etc. The menu will appear if you change to some other default format like Mother Earth and then click back to Custom . The template I was using for Gmail Talk didn’t have a friendly background color to match, so I just used probably one of the worst Adsense combinations on the planet, all black background with white text. That thing sticks out like bug splatter on the windshield.

I also didn’t see a way through the included Blogger/Adsense interface to make a special channel, but then that can be done inside the main Adsense interface.

Also, for those who use blogger to post to their own hosted blog (not using blogspot) I tried adding ads to my own hosted blog that uses the Blogger software to post to it. I followed the same procedure as adding to Gmail Talk.

All in all, not quite one click, but darn close. Nice job, Blogger crew!

Did this post make you go hmm?

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• GMail Talk blog
• Google Blog dogfoods to Blogspot + adds blogroll
• Google Adsense adds new ad formats and language support
• Whinering about Gmail Web Clips and RSS
• How to provide Google Adsense with an authorized list of sites to show ads