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Blogger is an American online
content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content (content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...
founded in 1999 which enables multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries.
Pyra Labs Pyra Labs is a subsidiary of Google (Alphabet) that created the Blogger service in 1999. Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003. History Pyra was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The company's first product, also named "Pyra", was a web ...
developed it before being acquired by
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. I ...
in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be accessed from a user-owned custom domain (such as www.example.com) by using
DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...
facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers. A user can have up to 100 blogs or websites per account. Google Blogger also enabled users to publish blogs and websites to their own web hosting server via FTP until May 1, 2010. All such blogs and websites had to be redirected to a blogspot.com
subdomain In the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is a part of another (main) domain. For example, if a domain offered an online store as part of their website example.com, it might use the subdomain shop.example.com . Ov ...
or point their own domain to Google's servers via
DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...
. Google Blogger has a wide international user base and is available in more than 60 languages, despite its decline in popularity in the United States.


History

Pyra Labs Pyra Labs is a subsidiary of Google (Alphabet) that created the Blogger service in 1999. Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003. History Pyra was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The company's first product, also named "Pyra", was a web ...
launched Blogger on August 23, 1999. It is credited with popularizing the format as one of the first dedicated blog-publishing tools. Pyra Labs was purchased by
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. I ...
in February 2003 for an undisclosed amount. Premium features, which Pyra had actually offered for a fee, were made free as a result of the takeover. Evan Williams, a co-founder of Pyra Labs, left Google in October 2004.
Picasa Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by Ide ...
was acquired by Google in 2004, and Picasa and its photo-sharing service Hello were incorporated into Blogger, enabling users to upload images to their blogs. Blogger underwent a major redesign on May 9, 2004, which included
web standards Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of st ...
-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and email posting. Blogger's new version, codenamed "Invader," was released in
beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...
alongside the gold update on August 14, 2006. Users were moved to Google servers, and new features such as interface language in French, Italian, German, and Spanish were added. 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. On February 24, 2015, Blogger announced that as of late March it would no longer allow its users to post sexually explicit content, unless the nudity offers "substantial public benefit," for example in "artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts." On February 28, 2015, accounting for severe backlash from long-term bloggers, Blogger reversed its decision on banning sexual content, going back to the previous policy that allowed explicit images and videos if the blog was marked as "adult".


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. Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a
drag-and-drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...
template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new
Web feed On the World Wide Web, a web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors ''syndicate'' a web feed, thereby allowing users to ''subscribe'' a channel to it by adding the feed ...
options. Furthermore, blogs are updated dynamically, as opposed to rewriting
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript ...
files. In a version of the service called Blogger in Draft, 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 Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes: Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. Google ...
-based implementations, including: * Adding location to posts via
geotagging Geotagging, or GeoTagging, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data us ...
. * Post time-stamping at publication, not at original creation. * Vertical re-sizing of the post editor. The size is saved in a per-user, per-blog preference. * Link editing in compose mode. * Full Safari 3 support and fidelity on both
Windows Windows is a group of several Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, W ...
and
macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...
. * New Preview dialog that shows posts in a width and font size approximating what is seen in the published view. * Placeholder image for tags so that embeds are movable in compose mode. * New toolbar with Google aesthetics, faster loading time, and "undo" and "redo" buttons, also added the full justification button, a strike-through button, and an expanded color palette. In 2010, Blogger introduced new templates and redesigned its website. The new post editor was criticized for being less reliable than its predecessor. In 2020, Google Blogger slowly introduced an improved web experience for Blogger. They moved everyone to the new interface starting in late June, many Blogger creators see the new interface become their default. Blogger is now responsive on the web, making it easier to use on mobile devices in addition to having a new look.


Available languages

As of late 2016, Blogger is available in these 60 languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Basque, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (United Kingdom), English (United States), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain), Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Zulu.


Country-specific Blogger addresses

In February 2013, Blogger began integrating user blogs with multiple country-specific URLs. For example, exampleuserblogname.blogspot.com would be automatically redirected to exampleuserblogname.blogspot.ca in Canada, exampleuserblogname.blogspot.co.uk in the United Kingdom. Blogger explained that by doing this they could manage the blog content more locally so if there was any objectionable material that violated a particular country's laws they could remove and block access to that blog for that country through the assigned
ccTLD A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all t ...
while retaining access through other ccTLD addresses and the default Blogspot.com URL. If a blog using a country-specific URL was removed it is still technically possible to access the blog through Google's No Country Redirect override by entering the URL using the regular Blogspot.com address and adding /ncr after .com. In May 2018, Blogger stopped redirecting to ccTLDs and country-specific URLs would now redirect to the default Blogspot.com addresses.


Available designs

Blogger allows its users to choose from multiple templates and then customize them. Users may also choose to create their own templates using
CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...
. The new design template, known as "Dynamic View", was introduced on 31 August 2011 with Dynamic Views being introduced on 27 September 2011. It is built with
AJAX Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...
,
HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...
, and CSS3. The time for loading is 40 percent shorter than traditional templates, and allows user to present blog in seven different ways: classic, flipcard, magazine, mosaic, sidebar, snapshot, and timeslide. Readers still have the option to choose preferable views when the blog owner has set a default view. Some of the widgets (e.g., Labels, Profile, Link List, Subscription Links, Followers and Blog Archive etc.) are available for Dynamic Views; other templates are chosen by the blogger. In April 2013, Blogger updated its HTML template editor that has some improvements to make it easy for the users to edit the blog's source code. The editor was updated with syntax highlight, number line and jump-to-widget button for ease of editing the code.


Integration

* "Blogger for Word" is an add-in for
Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...
which allows users to save a Microsoft Word document directly to a Blogger blog, as well as edit their posts both on- and offline. , Google says "Blogger for Word is not currently compatible with the new version of Blogger", and they state no decision has been made about supporting it with the new Blogger. However,
Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Novem ...
adds native support for a variety of blogging systems, including Blogger. * Blogger also started integration with
Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology co ...
Associates in December 2009, as a service to generate revenue. It was not publicly announced, but by September 2011 it appeared that all integration options had been removed and that the partnership had ended. * Open Live Writer (formerly
Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer is a discontinued desktop blog-publishing application that was developed by Microsoft and distributed as part of the Windows Live suite of apps. The last major release of Windows Live Writer came out in 2012 ( end-of-life), an ...
, originally part of the
Windows Live Windows Live is a discontinued brand name for a set of web services and software products developed by Microsoft as part of its software-as-a-service platform. Chief components under the brand name included web services (all of which were exposed ...
suite) can publish directly to Blogger.


Blogger on mobile devices

Blogger has launched mobile applications for users with mobile devices. Users can post and edit blogs, and also share photos and links on Blogger through their mobile devices. Not only advanced mobile devices, such as smartphones, are being considered, since users can also post blogs via traditional cell phones by SMS and MMS. The major two
mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typical laptops are "mobile", the operating systems used on ...
s that Blogger focuses on are Android and
iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
. Blogger allow users to edit blogs anywhere through the app and either publish the blogs or save them as drafts. Quick navigation from posts and drafts is accessible from a list. Users can attach photos by taking a picture with a Blogger app or selecting pictures from their photo galleries. Sharing current locations on posts is also possible by tabbing My Location bar and adding locations. Users can also share photos and links directly to Blogger. Blogger also provides dynamic mobile views for the blogging compatibility with mobile devices and smartphones. They enhance the readability accuracy on these smart devices, but editing a blog on the blogger app remains an open issue for the users.


Blocking

Blogger has been blocked for various periods of time in the following countries: * Cuba *
Fiji Fiji ( , ,; fj, Viti, ; Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी, ''Fijī''), officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists ...
*
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
(some ISPs in 2012 blocking an IP address put into
Federal List of Extremist Materials Federal List of Extremist Materials (russian: Федеральный список экстремистских материалов, ''Federal'nyy spisok ekstremistskikh matyerialov'') is a list of works that are banned in Russian Federation, prim ...
in 2011) *
Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkme ...
*
Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbekis ...
*
Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyzstan,, pronounced or the Kyrgyz Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west, Tajikistan to the south, and the People's Republic of China to the east ...
*
Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 243 million people, and has the world's second-lar ...
*
People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
*
Russian Federation Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eight ...
(some ISPs in 2012 blocking an IP address put into
Federal List of Extremist Materials Federal List of Extremist Materials (russian: Федеральный список экстремистских материалов, ''Federal'nyy spisok ekstremistskikh matyerialov'') is a list of works that are banned in Russian Federation, prim ...
in 2011) *
Syrian Arab Republic Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...
*
Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula in ...
*
Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making it ...
*
Yemen Yemen (; ar, ٱلْيَمَن, al-Yaman), officially the Republic of Yemen,, ) is a country in Western Asia. It is situated on the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, and borders Saudi Arabia to the north and Oman to the northeast and sha ...
Blocking of *.blogspot.com domains by keyword-based Internet filtering systems is also encountered due to the domain containing the substring " gspot"; however, this can be alleviated by excluding the "blogspot.com" section of the URL from the keyword-based Internet filtering whilst the *. section of the URL is exposed to keyword-based Internet filtering.


Limitations

Blogger has the following limitations on content storage and bandwidth, per user account: * Blog description – 500 characters max. * Number of blogs – 100 blogs per account * Number of labels – 5,000 unique labels per blog (an increase from the original 2,000), 20 unique labels per post (with at most 200 characters) * Number of pictures – Ordinarily, up to 1 GB of total storage, shared with
Picasa Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by Ide ...
Web. If you've upgraded to
Google+ Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a Social networking service, social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social netwo ...
, your photos will be stored in
Google Photos Google Photos is a photo sharing and storage service developed by Google. It was announced in May 2015 and spun off from Google+, the company's former social network. As of June 1, 2021, in its free tier, any newly uploaded photo and video c ...
, where you have 15 GB of storage space shared with
Gmail Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP an ...
and
Drive Drive or The Drive may refer to: Motoring * Driving, the act of controlling a vehicle * Road trip, a journey on roads Roadways Roadways called "drives" may include: * Driveway, a private road for local access to structures, abbreviated "drive" * ...
. However, if one has signed up for Google+ account, images less than 16 megapixels (4920 × 3264) would not be counted to this storage limit. For users not signed up for Google+, 800 × 800 pixels and below images would not be included in this storage space. * Number of posts – There is no limit on the number of posts one can have in one blog. However, a maximum of 100 posts can be created or published per day. * Size of pages – Individual pages (the main page of a blog or archive pages) are limited to 1 MB * Size of pictures – If posted via Blogger Mobile, limited 250 KB per picture; posted pictures are scaled to 1600px * Number of pages – There is no limit on the number of pages you can have on one blog * Team members (those who can write to a blog) – 100 invitations per blog * Favicon – Any square image less than 100 KB * Account suspension: if a site is violating any terms of service, it may be suspended by Blogger without any notice. Repeated violations may lead to Google account suspension. On February 18, 2010, 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. Private blogs are limited to only 100 members.


Support

The official support channel is the Blogger Product Forum. This online discussion forum, delivered using Google Groups, serves Blogger users of varying experience, and receives some monitoring from Google staff. "Product Experts," formerly known as "Top contributors," are community-members nominated by the Google staff who enjoy additional privileges including managing discussions and direct access to Google staff. There is likely to be a top contributor or other knowledgeable person reading the forum almost all the time. A number of people, including some top contributors, run personal blogs where they offer advice and post information about common problems.
StackExchange Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The reputation system allows th ...
's Web Applications forum has a tag for "blogger", which is used for questions about various blogging platforms, including Blogger.


See also

*
List of Google products The following is a list of products, services, and apps provided by Google. Active, soon-to-be discontinued, and discontinued products, services, tools, hardware, and other applications are broken out into designated sections. Web-based product ...
*
Niche blogging Niche blogging is the act of creating a blog with the intent of using it to market to a particular niche market. Niche blogs (also commonly referred to as "niche websites") may appeal to "geographic areas, a speciality industry, ethnic or age gro ...
*
LiveJournal LiveJournal (russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, ...


References


External links

* * {{Google LLC Blog hosting services Blog software Internet properties established in 1999 Google acquisitions
Blogger A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in Reverse ...
2003 mergers and acquisitions 1999 establishments in California