The latest tips and news from the Blogger team
Share Blogger posts to Buzz
April 14, 2010
by Jiho Han, Software Engineer, Blogger
When
Google Buzz
launched in February, many wondered how they could share cool posts to their Buzz stream. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Blogger has made it easy to share to Google Buzz via the Share button in the Blogger navigation bar. Just click “Share”, choose Google Buzz, and you’ll be able to customize your message before posting to Buzz.
Google Buzz is a
new way to share
updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. Better yet, all comments to your Buzz post get sent right to your Gmail inbox so it's easy to keep the conversation going. Just go to the
Google Buzz homepage
and give it a try! We know you write interesting stuff, so sharing to Buzz is a great way to spread the word about your blog.
Building your audience is important, and sharing to social networks is a great way to promote your site. We are committed to make the sharing experience better on Blogger: more updates are on their way, so please stay tuned.
Saving one million hours per week
March 30, 2010
by Noah Fiedel, Blogger Tech Lead
Five weeks ago we rolled out
Auto Pagination
, a major milestone in our efforts to make Blogger faster for you and your readers. We are very happy to report a ten percent overall decrease in page loading latency across all Blogger blogs and a twenty-seven percent decrease on archive pages.
Just how significant is a ten percent latency reduction? It's not often that software engineers get to save lives, yet in just the past five weeks we’ve saved eight human lifetimes spent waiting for pages to load! Every week saves an additional:
1 Million Hours
114 Years
1.6 Human Lifetimes
Some of you have expressed concern over the change in how Blogger displays your blogs. Without addressing each individual case, the vast majority of blogs negatively impacted were not actually blogs, but were using Blogger as a kind of free web host. As today’s post makes clear, Auto Pagination has had an extraordinarily positive impact on how blogs are consumed — blog readers are spending less time waiting for pages to load and more time reading the posts you work so hard to write. (By the way: if your pages show fewer posts than you would like, we recommend using
After the Jump
to ensure that your readers can see more posts per page.)
If a ten percent improvement has such a major impact, what else can be done to speed up your blog? One area we’re looking at is third-party JavaScript. We remain one of the few blogging services to allow users unlimited ability to add JavaScript to their pages — but that flexibility comes at a cost. These JavaScript widgets often add several seconds to page loads — even on fast Internet connections. We’ll talk more about this in a future post; in the mean time, you can try out Google’s
Page Speed
to identify what might be causing a page to load slowly.
As always, thanks for using Blogger!
Express yourself with the Blogger Template Designer
March 11, 2010
by Siobhan Quinn, Blogger Product Manager
We’re thrilled to announce that the
Blogger Template Designer
has launched to
Blogger in Draft
, our experimental playground where users can try out Blogger’s latest features. The Template Designer brings a new level of customization to your blog. Take a look:
In the Template Designer, you’ll find:
15 new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
Hundreds of professional background images from iStockphoto
Customizable colors, fonts, and more!
We have more details and tips in our
Blogger Template Designer post
on the Blogger in Draft blog.
We worked with
iStockphoto
, the leading microstock image marketplace, to put together a great collection of beautiful images and patterns to use as backgrounds on your blogs. The photos are stunning, and are free to use on your Blogger blog.
That being said, today’s launch is just the beginning. We’ll add more of our own designs over the coming weeks and months and, through the new
Template Design Group
, we’ll be working with members of the Blogger design community to bring their templates into the new Template Designer.
Help test drive the Blogger Template Designer by logging into
Blogger In Draft
, and learn more about the new features in more detail on the
Blogger In Draft blog
.
SXSW 2010: Blogger & Google Reader Party in Austin
March 01, 2010
Blogger and Google Reader are throwing a party at
South by South West
and you're invited! We'll be debuting a very special feature at the party, so come celebrate with the Blogger and Google Reader teams. Drinks, food, tunes, swag, and good times will be in full effect.
Party Details
Blogger & Google Reader Party
Sunday March 14 @ 8:00PM
Six Lounge
,
117 W 4th St @ Colorado
Remember to bring your SXSW Interactive badge. See you there!
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.
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