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You may have noticed a bit of an unplanned outage for Blog*Spot blogs yesterday afternoon. We’re really sorry about this. There was an unlikely problem with some of the Blog*Spot machines that took our engineers and operations folks a few hours of work to track down. In something of a Catch-22, both Buzz and Blogger Status are hosted on Blog*Spot, so we weren’t able to get the word out that things weren’t working properly and that we were fixing them.



We didn’t lose any posts because of this, but if you posted to your blog during the outage, there’s a chance that you’ll need to republish to see the changes. (How do I republish my blog?)



The good news is that, were this to ever happen again, we’d be able to diagnose and fix it in minutes, not hours, now that we’re aware of the potential problem. Also, we’ll be improving our outage indicator so that we’ll be able to communicate about unexpected things like this much more directly in the future.



Again, we apologize. We wanted to read blogs yesterday afternoon, too, so we totally understand any frustration you may have had.

Information about yesterday’s Blog*Spot outage posted to Blogger Buzz.

Darren Rowse, blogging at ProBlogger, posts 11 tips for increasing pageviews. This is mostly in the context of advertising on blogs (nothing wrong with that: How do I put AdSense on my blog?), but the tips are good even if you don’t sell ads on your blog. After all, if you can get readers to read more of your blog the first time they come, they’re more likely to find something they like and want to come back for more.



I think the best of Darren’s tips are those about linking your posts together: referring to posts you’ve made in the past, writing posts in series, or even just highlighting your best posts in a spot on the sidebar (or at the bottom). You may recall that last tip from Jacob Nielsen’s usability tips for weblogs, something I wrote about a few months back. (See! I’m doing it! Go go Blogger Buzz pageviews!)



Personally, I discourage tip #8, which says to include only summaries in your RSS feeds. I likes me my Google Reader, and get a bit annoyed by sites that only have the summaries instead of full posts. I think it’s better to include other ways to get your feed-reading readers to come to your site, perhaps with the aforementioned intra-blog links, or (ProBlogger tip #10) encouraging community in your comments.



Disclaimer: Pageview tips not effective during Blog*Spot outages.



[via Freshblog]

Can you tell it’s a bit of a slow Friday at Blogger? Anyway, here’s Prashant and me being happy and excited in our new Blogger hoodies, which just showed up in a big box of warm fuzziness.



You can be just as rockin’ by getting Blogger gear at the Google Store. When people ask, you can say the B stands for “B’awesome.” It’s a great way to make new friends.



In actual Blogger news, the site’s up, spam’s down, and, as always, we’re working on great new features. So all is right in the b’awesomeosphere.

Ever want to know what bloggers are saying about a web page but been too lazy to do anything more than watch slick animations? You clearly have a fever for which the only cure is Blogger Web Comments, our new extension for Firefox 1.5. Once it’s installed, you can see instant results from Blog Search showing you posts about the page you’re looking at. Plus, there’s a Blogger posting form built in, so you can immediately make a post on your own blog. Glen Murphy has a little story about making the extension in his announcement post on the Google Blog.



You’ll need the new Firefox 1.5 to use this, which makes the three to four minutes directly following your reading of this post the perfect time to try Firefox out, or upgrade if you’re still using Firefox 1.0. Download Firefox from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/.



There are more nifty things you can install to make Firefox even more useful. There’s the Google Toolbar for Firefox (which includes a BlogThis! button for more Blogger posting possibilities) and the extensions described in the Wired News article, “The Firefox Hacks You Must Have.”

Did you know that you can easily post to your blog from any page on the web with our (newly improved) BlogThis! bookmarklet? We’ve just added the most popular buttons from our regular post editor without sacrificing the small size that makes BlogThis! so convenient.





If you’re using BlogThis! now, you should see the bold, italic, font color, link, and blockquote buttons already. If you’re not using BlogThis!, you can get it by following the instructions in our help article, or by enabling it on the Google Toolbar. (Click “Options,” go to the “More” tab, then click on the “BlogThis!” checkbox.)



BlogThis! is great for writing a quick post about a page that you’re looking at, without the (comparative) hassle of opening Blogger.com in a new window, picking a blog to post on, copying over the URL to make a link, then copying over more text that you want to quote, accidentally kicking the power cord out of your computer when you get up to feed the cat, needing to call the plumber to pump out the flood in your attic, forgetting where you were on your computer when it starts up again, realizing that you can click Recover Post to get back the work that you had lost, discovering that the kitten ate all the big cat’s food and you have to feed them both again because the kitten’s on a special diet of castor oil and pencil shavings because it pukes normal kitten food all over the power outlets, which are now smoking because of the combined electrical draw of the attic pump, the computer, and the rock tumbler that you’ve tossed an effigy of the kitten in because that’s how you have to control your rage, when all you really wanted to do was make a little post to tell your friends about that new blog with pictures of cute kittens and other things on it, but now you think that you don’t even want friends any more if this is the kind of situation they’ll put you in.



See? BlogThis! eliminates all of that.

We'll be taking Blogger down on Wednesday the 25th at 4pm PST to fix a bit of a switch that's gone wonky on us. The outage should last about 15 minutes. Blogger.com and Blog*Spot blogs will be inaccessible during this time.



This repair will fix the problem that caused the brief outage last Friday night. We're also using this down time as an opportunity to tune our databases for more efficient spam catching and deletion.



Update:

Theres a notice saying "scheduled outage at 4:00 PST" on blogger. I spent the whole time of writing this trying to figure out what they might do to cause a scheduled outrage before I noticed the lack of an r.

Found on McBlog



(P.S.: The switch and the rest of Blogger is cheerful and productive.)

Two complementary articles came up in my feed reader today. Russell Beattie criticizes a trend he’s seeing in the blog posts he reads:

I know how once in a while throwing a juicy post up on your server with some name calling, extreme opinions and a swear word or two can drive serious linkage and hits. You write stuff online every day for a few years, and its bound to get boring just following the same old routine, right? Might as well take a stick and poke at the bee-hive once in a while and see what happens. … Now it’s at the point where people have to write almost nothing but sensationalistic posts on their blog to get any attention. The more extreme, the more likely you’ll be to get links.

Meanwhile, Performancing writes their own tips on “link baiting,” the practice of writing posts so they’ll get attention from other bloggers. The “attack hook” that so annoys Beattie is there, but they also recommend the “news hook,” the “contrary hook,” the “resource hook,” and the “humor hook.”



Me, I prefer the “cute hook.” I mean, seriously. No one can resist linking to the pandog.

Okay, big lead time on this one. Lots of time to prepare yourself.



Blogger and Blog*Spot will be offline for approximately one hour from 7–8PM this coming Monday, February 6th. The little outage indicator will kick in Sunday night to remind you.



This time, we’re completing the long–prepared for cutover from an older, flakier piece of network equiptment to a shiny bright new one. (This is how they explain things to software guys like me.) That means fewer planned and “unplanned” outages in the future. Seriously. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the ops guys get all Office Space on the thing they’re taking out, given the trouble it’s caused.



Now get thee back to blogging.

Blogger.com is now back from a 45 minute outage. Two outages in one night. I feel like Dante from Clerks: “I’m not even supposed to be carrying the pager today!”



We’re really sorry about this spate of random downtime. As Jason mentioned, I mentioned that Monday’s fixup will lessen these types of outages in the future. The Blogger and Google engineers and ops folks are not just sitting around waiting for the next failure; we’re actively improving our infrastructure to lessen both the planned and unplanned Blogger outages.