We know that most of you blog for the sake of sharing your thoughts and opinions, however a little side income is like an unexpected gift. Today we’re releasing a new gadget that allows your readers to directly contribute to your blog. The gadget can be added to any part of your page, but we’ve formatted it to fit best in the sidebar.

Setup is only five simple steps and should only take a few minutes of your time; just follow the steps below:

1. Sign up for a Google Checkout Merchant account at checkout.google.com/sell
2. Be sure to enable the HTML API by going to the Settings tab, clicking the integration link and unchecking the “My company will only post digitally signed carts” checkbox. Also, copy the Merchant Id for use in step 5.
3. Back in Blogger, on the Design | Page Elements tab click “add a gadget” where you wish to place the Support gadget.
4. Add the "Support My Blog" gadget from the gadget gallery.
5. Customize your support button settings. The Checkout Merchant Id is the one you copied down in step two. Save and you’re done!

Your supporters can now contribute to your blog. Clicking on the support button will direct your supporters to Checkout to complete the transaction. For an example of the support button in action, please visit the following blog:

http://bloggercheckout.blogspot.com/

Update (5/31 7:45PM PST): We've published an incident report on Blogger Status. 

Update (5/15 10:55PM PST): Blogger should be back to normal for the vast majority of people affected by this issue -- if posts are still missing, please check your drafts (you may need to republish). We are in the process of restoring comments made during the affected period from 7:37am PDT on 5/11 to 1:30pm PDT on 5/12. If you still have other issues, please contact us via the temporary form we’ve set up for this particular issue. Thanks again for bearing with us, we’re deeply sorry for the inconvenience we caused. We’ll share an incident report later this week.

Update (5/14 5:37 PM PST): We're making progress restoring comments, some blogs with a lot of content are taking a little more time. Thanks for bearing with us.

Update (5/13 7:46PM PST): Nearly all posts since Wednesday are restored, now bringing back comments from last couple days. We expect the comments to be back this weekend or sooner.

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored.  Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation.  We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish.  We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring.

Again, we are very sorry for the impact to our authors and readers.  We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we’ll do our best to prevent this from happening again.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger