Blogger (service)

Blogger
Blogger screen.png
Blogger.com
URL www.blogger.com
Commercial? Yes
Type of site Blog Host
Registration Optional, Free
Available language(s) English
Owner Google Inc.
Created by Pyra Labs
Launched August 23, 1999[1]
Alexa rank 8[2]
Current status Active

Blogger is a blog storage service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at subdomains of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via ftp. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via Custom URLs.[3]

Contents

History

Main article: History of Blogger

On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format. In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features (for which Pyra had charged) to become free. About a year later, Pyra Labs' co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google. In 2004, Google purchased Picasa; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.

On May 9, 2004, Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features such as web standards-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by email. On August 14, 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed "Invader", alongside the gold release. This migrated users to Google servers and included some new features. In December 2006, this new version of Blogger was taken out of beta. By May 2007, Blogger had completely moved over to Google operated servers. Blogger was ranked 16 on the list of top 50 domains in terms of number of unique visitors in 2007.[4]

Redesign

As part of the Blogger redesign in 2006, all blogs associated with a user's Google Account were migrated to Google servers. Blogger claims that the service is now more reliable because of the quality of the servers.[5]

Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a drag-and-drop template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new Web feed options. Furthermore, blogs are updated dynamically, as opposed to rewriting HTML files.

In a version of the service called Blogger in Draft,[6] new features are tested before being released to all users. New features are discussed in the service's official blog.

In September 2009, Google introduced new features into Blogger as part of its tenth anniversary celebration. The features included a new interface for post editing, improved image handling, Raw HTML Conversion, and other Google Docs-based implementations, including:

The new post editor was criticized for being less reliable than its predecessor.[7]

Integration

Blocking

Blogger has been blocked for periods of time in the following countries:

Limitations

Blogger has imposed the following limitations on content storage and bandwidth, per user account[11]:

On February 18, 2010,[12] Blogger introduced "auto-pagination", which limited the number of posts that could be displayed on each page, often causing the number of posts on the main page to be less than that specified by the user and leading to a hostile response from some users.[13][14]

See also

References

  1. ↑ The Story of Blogger, Blogger.com
  2. ↑ "blogger.com - Traffic Details from Alexa". Alexa Internet, Inc. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/blogger.com. Retrieved 2009-10-17. 
  3. ↑ http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/01/important-note-to-ftp-users.html
  4. ↑ "Top 50 Domains - www.TheLifeMovie.blogspot.com Ranked by Unique Visitors"” September, 2007.
  5. ↑ Blogger Buzz: The New Version of Blogger
  6. ↑ http://draft.blogger.com/
  7. ↑ Critique and Criticism of the New Blogger Post Editor - Experiment Garden
  8. ↑ http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42497&topic=8931
  9. ↑ Rosen, Jeffrey (2008). "Google’s Gatekeepers". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30google-t.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all. Retrieved 2008-12-01. "Over the past couple of years, Google and its various applications have been blocked, to different degrees, by 24 countries. Blogger is blocked in Pakistan, for example, and Orkut in Saudi Arabia." 
  10. ↑ "Blogger.com Banned in Turkey". advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org. 2008. http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2008/10/25/bloggercom-banned-in-turkey/. Retrieved 2008-12-01. "A Turkish court has blocked access to the popular blog hosting service Blogger (Blogger.com and Blogspot.com owned by Google), from Friday, October 24th, 2008." The ban was lifted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008." 
  11. ↑ "What are the limits on my Blogger account?". http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42348. Retrieved 21 December 2009. 
  12. ↑ Vardhman Jain, "Auto Pagination on Blogger", Blogger Buzz, February 18, 2010.
  13. ↑ "Problem Rollup: Auto Pagination for blogs with Classic templates", Blogger Help Forum (retrieved March 1, 2010).
  14. ↑ "Problem Rollup: Auto Pagination for blogs with Layouts templates", Blogger Help Forum (retrieved March 1, 2010).

External links