Preferred Blogger Gadget Adding

I've realized, after using this blog site for a bit of testing, that the preferred method of adding "gadgets" or "widgets" to a blog here is to use the Layout tool. I'd been simply inserting the code created by various counters directly into the template's HTML, but as seen when I changed templates and lost my changes, that's not a great idea. Using the lovely tools Blogger/Google provide not only makes it a bit easier -- there's no need to scroll though all that code to find what you hope is the right place to insert it -- but might also preserve such add-ons even if the template is changed. This is really a pretty good blogging software. I've been using WordPress on my own websites for a long time, but Blogger is really easy to customize. I like 'em both.