Customizing our Blogger blogs is now easier than ever. Aside from the hundreds of pre-made templates available for us to simply upload to our sites, there are innumerable tutorials helping us design more beautiful and interesting sites. Yet some Blogger users look beyond these simpler design features to construct stunning original Blogger designs.

Over at We Love Blogger, you can find a daily showcase of inspiring Blogger-based designs. Here are the cream of the crop: more than 80 Blogger-powered blogs of unusual design or outstanding quality, provided as a feast of inspiration for your own projects.

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As many of you may now realize, I've been on a somewhat lengthy hiatus...

Unfortunately in my absence, one of my websites used for hosting older templates and related images has disappeared! This means that many of you currently using these templates now find them unusable, or downright ugly.

Luckily, I've managed to find an old backup CD which includes most of these templates and I'm now in the process of updating them.

Unfortunately, the backup CDs are mostly corrupted. I'm unable to access the images used for these files in order to update the templates.

The templates affected by this issue are:

• Sunset
• Girly Web 2.0
• Magical - Now updated - see below
• Sweet Dreams (all versions)

I'll update this post regularly with details of any templates I am able to update with links to the updated files. Please let me know if you're experiencing issues with a template not listed here so I can attempt to resolve all problems as soon as possible

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Aneesh of Blogger Widgets has developed a new "Related Posts" script for Blogger which displays thumbnails of images in addition to linked post titles:

In appearance, this Blogger "add-on" is similar to the LinkWithin script. Each section is highlighted in a complementary colour when the mouse hovers over it, and the entire section is clickable, leading to the URL of the "related post" displayed.

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This issue should now be resolved. I have checked the Twitter Updates gadget (plus others) on various sites, and am now assured everything should be back to normal.

I've been made aware of the issues many Blogger users are experiencing with the Twitter Updates gadget. At present, this is showing "tweets" from the user @undefined and ignores user preferences for the number of tweets to be displayed.

The same issue affects some of my other gadgets too: most notably, the Flickr, Picasa, TwitPic and Juitter gadgets.

As far as I can tell right now, this issue stems from a sudden, random error affecting any gadgets utilizing User Preferences. These issues do not seem to be affecting every blog in which such gadgets are installed.

The Blogger Team are aware of the issue and are investigating now. I'm also testing various changes to user preferences for my gadgets to see if a different solution to registering user preferences could resolve the issue for my gadgets.

I anyone is still receiving errors when using their Twitter Updates gadget (particularly if this displays tweets from @undefined's stream) please do let me know in the comments or send me an email.

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Displaying avatars beside comments in our blogs has been a long anticipated feature. Today, the Blogger Team announced that this feature is now enabled for Blogger blogs, allowing us to see the profile image or avatar of those leaving comments on our posts:

Today we have extended embedded comments to display profile images next to the comments that your visitors write. Though profile images have been available with the other commenting options, we are happy to bring them to embedded comments as part of the Blogger Birthday feature series (via Blogger Buzz)

However, this feature currently seems available only to those using Blogger's default templates.

Update:  Soufiane of LeBlogger.com has kindly emailed me with a quick and simple solution for us to add the required code to customized Blogger templates! Details below.

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