History
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. In October 2004, 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 had some new features, including interface language
in French, Italian, German and Spanish.
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.
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 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, new features are tested before being released to all users. New features are discussed in the service's official blog.
Screenshot of blog post compose window of Blogger, April 2012
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:
- Adding location to posts via geotagging.
- 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 and Mac OS.
- 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 was 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.
Available languages
Blogger is available in these languages: Arabic, Bengali, Indonesia,
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional),
Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French,
German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian,
Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam,
Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil),
Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian,
Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.
Nepali, Farashi
Country Specific Blogger Addresses
Starting in February 2013 Blogger began integrating user blogs with
multiple Country Specific URL addresses i.e.
exampleuserblogname.blogspot.com would be automatically redirected to
exampleuserblogname.blogspot.ca in Canada,
exampleuserblogname.blogspot.co.uk in the United Kingdom etc... 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 while retaining access
through other ccTLD addresses and the default BlogSpot.com url. However
it should be noted that if a blog using a country specific URL was
removed it is still technically possible to still access the blog
through Google's No Country Redirect override by entering the URL
address using the regular BlogSpot.com address and adding /ncr after the
.com.
Available designs
Blogger allows its users to choose from various templates
available,and fully customize them. Users may also choose to create
their own template using CSS. The new design template, known as Dynamic
View, was introduced recently. It is built with AJAX, HTML5 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.
