The latest tips and news from the Blogger team
Auto Pagination on Blogger
February 18, 2010
by Vardhman Jain, Software Engineer, Mountain View
Latency is a word you hear a lot at Google. We are always looking for ways to make our products faster, because we have consistently found that faster page loads mean more satisfied users. This post is the first of an occasional series that will discuss ways in which we’re working to make blogs load faster for all users.
A few months ago, we took a look at ways to improve the performance of Blogger blogs, and noticed that many pages — particularly search results pages, label pages and archive pages — were taking longer to load than they should.
This has lots of implications. Users suffer — pages take longer to load, and for anyone around the world who pays for their bandwidth, they can incur unnecessary charges as their browser downloads more content than needed. You suffer, because as latency increases, pageviews go down. (See
here
for a study Google did last year for this phenomenon at google.com.)
Starting today, we’re rolling out a change that affects how we paginate webpages on Blogger. We will dynamically adjust how much content to send to the browser depending on (a) the amount of HTML on the page being requested (in kilobytes) and (b) the number of images on the page. Users can continue to use “older posts” and “newer posts” navigation elements to see additional posts.
For major changes like this, we do incremental roll-outs so we can monitor performance as they progress. We expect the change to be fully deployed over the next week, and once fully deployed, we expect to see several results:
pages will load faster
pageviews, if impacted at all, may increase
We will keep an eye on things, and if we see anything unexpected, we will update this post. Otherwise, keep blogging — and we’ll keep working to make your blog faster for you and your readers!
A quick note about music blog removals
February 10, 2010
Earlier today,
word spread
about some popular music blogs that were recently removed from Blogger. While we make it a policy to not publicly discuss individual users or their accounts, we wanted to clarify a few things about how and when Blogger enforces its
Terms of Service
as they relate to
our DMCA policy
.
Last summer, we
updated our enforcement of the DMCA
. Our current policy is that when we receive a DMCA complaint, we:
Notify the blogger about the complaint by e-mail and on the Blogger dashboard.
Reset the offending post to 'draft' status, allowing the blogger to remove the offending content.
Send a copy of the complaint to
ChillingEffects.org
.
When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.
Inevitably, we occasionally receive DMCA complaints even though the blogger does have the legal right to link to the music in question. Whether this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are "official," it happens. If this happens to you,
it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question.
Otherwise, if we receive multiple DMCA complaints for your blog, this could very well constitute repeat offenses, compelling us to take action.
Update:
Should have linked directly to the
instructions for filing a counter-notification
.
Update 2/11/10:
We looked into this issue further and identified one case where a blogger did not receive notification of any DMCA complaints before their blog was removed. We're sorry about this.
We've contacted the blog owner and restored their blog, effective immediately, and we fixed the bug that caused the termination without prior notification. We're also looking into additional preventative protections. We know the DMCA process can be difficult to navigate, and we're working on ways to make this process as smooth as possible.
Create Pages in Blogger
February 03, 2010
By Sean McCullough, Software Engineer
Another top user-requested feature has just graduated from
Blogger In Draft
! Blogger now makes it easy to create
Pages
linked from your blog.
This feature lets you easily publish static information on stand-alone pages. For example, you can create an
About This Blog
page that discusses the evolution of your blog, or a
Contact Me
page that provides directions, a phone number, and a map to your location.
You create a page similar to how you write a blog post. From
Blogger
click the
Posting | Edit Pages
tab, then click
New Page
. (Note: you can create up to 10 pages.)
Once your page is published, you can link to it from the new
Pages
widget. The Pages widget lets you add links to your pages as tabs at the top of your blog, or as links in your blog's sidebar.
In the Pages widget, you can decide which pages will be linked and in what order they will appear. You can also choose whether you want new pages to appear automatically in the Pages widget by checking or unchecking the box to the left of
Add new Pages by default
.
Finally, for those of you that have custom templates, your custom template may not automatically support Pages as horizontal "tabs". If you are familiar with HTML, follow
these instructions on how to add Pages to your custom template
.
Looking forward to seeing all of the Pages that bloggers create!
How the Google Page Creator shutdown may affect your blog
February 03, 2010
By Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer (Krakow, Poland)
A while back, Google
announced
that they were shutting down
Google Page Creator
and offered users the option to upgrade to
Google Sites
. In the past, some custom template designers used Page Creator to host javascript, a file type that Google Sites does not support. Since a number of bloggers use templates that rely on files hosted on Page Creator, we realized that links to those files would break once the migration from Page Creator to Sites was complete.
Fret not! Rather than see our users' templates break, we built a tool to preserve these links and host the affected files. To find out if your blog is affected, login to your
Blogger Dashboard
. If we've detected that your blog template contains links to Google Page Creator, you will see the following warning:
If you see this warning, click
Update and review
to access the
Blogger Template Fixer
and correct the links on your blog. (Note: you may not notice any problems with your blog until Page Creator shuts down over the coming days). Visit our
Help Center
to learn more about fixing your template.
Also, if you have issues fixing your template, let us know at the
Blogger Help Group
.
Important Note to FTP Users
January 22, 2010
Last May,
we discussed a number of challenges facing
Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger:
only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP
— yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.
Three years ago we
launched Custom Domains
to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post
discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP
and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a
good overview
of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.
For that reason,
we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010
. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:
We are building a migration tool
that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL)
that will be available to all users the week of February 22
. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
We will be providing a
dedicated blog
and help documentation
to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP.
Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released
.
We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.
Support Haiti Disaster Relief
January 13, 2010
Like many of you, we watched in horror as
news emerged from Haiti
about yesterday's disastrous earthquake. For those of you who publish your blog with Blogger, we built a couple of widgets that make it easy to invite your readers to contribute money to the Red Cross's international disaster relief effort. Pick a size that best fits your sidebar:
After clicking the appropriate button, select which of your blogs you want to add the widget to, then click "Add widget". The Red Cross assures us that 100% of the money raised is going to disaster relief efforts in Haiti — we and they thank you for your support!
Not on Blogger? Be sure to
visit the Red Cross's Haiti banners page
with banners that you can add manually, or
visit Google's page
containing information about relief organizations, news and contact info relating to the earthquake.
Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates
December 16, 2009
Earlier this year we simplified the process for monetizing your blog by
adding a “Monetize” tab
in the Blogger app. We started with AdSense, which allows you to add contextual advertising to your pages; more recently we
added AdSense for Feeds
to help you generate revenue from the distribution of your blog via RSS and Atom. Today we launched a third option: direct integration with Amazon Associates to search Amazon’s product catalog and add links to products that earn you commissions when your readers buy products you recommend.
With this feature, you can search Amazon directly from the Blogger editor and add pictures and links to Amazon products right into your posts. Your readers will earn you commissions whenever they buy the products you recommend, and if you don’t already have an Amazon Associates account, you can sign up for one for free without leaving Blogger.
If you’ve ever written a blog post about a book, recommended a gadget, or reviewed a toy you bought for your kids, you’ve likely gone through the process of drafting the post, opening up a separate window to go to find a site that sells the product, then going back to Blogger to paste the link to the product into the post editor.
Starting today, you can search the Amazon product catalog without leaving the Blogger interface and insert links to the products you find into your posts. Not only is the process of linking to products more efficient, but Amazon makes it easy for you to earn money whenever your readers actually buy the products you write about. This is known as an “affiliate program”, and it’s designed to let you recommend products you like to your audience — if they buy the product, you’ll earn a commission on that purchase. (For more on affiliate programs in general,
here is a good overview
at ProBlogger from this summer, and Darren’s “
11 Lessons Learned
” post about Amazon Associates is a good review of how to get the most out of the program.)
To get started, click on the Monetize tab for your blog and click “Amazon Associates”. Walk through the setup wizard, and add the Product Finder once you’re done.
Now for the fun part: when you are writing a post on Blogger, you’ll see an Amazon gadget to the right of your post editor (the “Product Finder”). You can search the Amazon product catalog from within Blogger — type in the name of the product you are writing about, and insert a link to the product, an image of the product, or an iframe containing the image, price details and a “buy it now” button. Every link that’s created contains your unique Associates ID, ensuring that Amazon will credit you for any purchases that result from readers clicking the link on your blog.
If you’re an existing Amazon Associate, completing this setup simply makes the Product Finder available on Blogger for you — you continue to earn the same referral rate from Amazon. New Associates receive the same referral rate from Amazon that they would have received if they signed up directly. If you’re not interested in earning a referral, you can still install the Product Finder: from the “Amazon Associates” page under the Monetize tab, click “I'll do this later — show me more Amazon options” and then click “Add the Product Finder” button.
A quick note about trust: affiliate programs work well when readers trust you. You should avoid promoting products simply because of the referral fee you might earn — readers may lose some of that trust if they sense your posts exist solely to make you money. You may also want to disclose to your readers that you will earn a commission on their purchase — some readers even prefer knowing that you benefit from their business.
There’s more information about this integration at
Amazon.com
, and
the Amazon Associates blog
has some more details. This integration is the result of months of collaboration between the engineers at both companies, and we’re very excited to share the results of this collaboration with you. Happy blogging!
Coming up Next...
November 10, 2009
by Helen Kang, Software Engineer, Blogger
Some of you must have wondered what the Next Blog link on the NavBar does, and clicked on the link once or twice. Next Blog used to take you to a random blog, written by a random blogger. Your fellow blogger could have been writing her blog in a language that you don't know how to read. Or you might be someone who likes to read about food and restaurants in Germany, but your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog.
We've made the Next Blog link more useful, by taking you to a blog that you might like. The new and improved Next Blog link will now take you to a blog with similar content, in a language that you understand. If you are reading a Spanish blog about food, the Next Blog link will likely take you to another blog about food. In Spanish!
You might discover a cool blogger who has hobbies similar to yours, has similar taste in electronic gadgets, likes sports that you're into, or has similar curiosities and interests. We will finish rolling out the new and improved Next Blog link over the next week and hope that you will enjoy discovering blogs that are likely to interest you.
This has been a fun, collaborative effort on the Blogger team and we've enjoyed the support we received from other Google teams. We really hope you enjoy the new, more relevant Next Blog as much as we do.
Blogger in Your Own Words
November 06, 2009
Last week we asked you for a few words to describe both the Blogger of the present and the Blogger you'd like to see in the future. You responded overwhelmingly, and now as promised we'd like to share the unedited results with you:
Blogger Today
(click for large version)
Blogger in the Future
(click for large version)
Thanks to everyone who pitched in their two cents; we're very excited to take your words and start writing the next chapter of Blogger.
(And of course thanks to
Wordle
for the awesome word clouds!)
Improving Our Communication of Blogger Service Interruptions
November 04, 2009
By Eddie Kessler, Blogger Engineering Manager
After a recent service interruption, we started talking about how we could improve our communications about these (hopefully infrequent) issues. Going forward, in the case of significant service interruptions, we plan to publish a post mortem on the
Blogger Status blog
within 3 business days to provide details about what went wrong and what we're doing to help prevent similar problems in the future.
During any outage, we try to keep the
Blogger Status blog
updated once we know about an issue. Of course sometimes — as was the case on Saturday — affected users who cannot reach Blogger cannot reach the Status blog either. In such cases, we will try to post updates on the
Blogger account on Twitter
to keep users apprised of what we know and when we expect a resolution.
We don't like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we're doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you. As always, thank you for using Blogger.
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