Author Archive

Blogger.com is back working again, again. Unscheduled outage hat trick tonight. As I get more information from our worldwide operations team I’ll let you know a bit more of why Blogger.com went down, and what we’ve done to keep this particular problem at bay.

We are currently experiencing some problems with Blog*Spot. A percentage of blogs are completely inaccessible. For others, you may need to reload a few times before you connect to a web server that will serve them. We anticipate things will be calmed down within the hour.



Update, 5:20PM: Blogger and Blog*Spot should be fully operational with the exception of one of our file servers. This means a percentage of blogs will be unpublishable and inaccessible. We are currently waiting for a lengthy disk integrity check to complete on the file server. There may also be transient delays serving blog pages while our load balancing evens out.



Update, 8:00PM: The Blog*Spot web servers are coming back online with connections to the file server that was out for most of the evening. (Its disk is totally okay, btw.) So, within the next 10–15 minutes everything should be completely back to normal.



Again, super major apologies for this.

Just a quick reminder that we will be going ahead with a planned network maintenance on Monday the 6th from 7–8PM PST. Blogger and Blog*Spot blogs will be unavailable during that time.



This maintenance won’t fix everything, but it will make things better. I promise.

Sorry for the short notice. Blogger.com will be down tonight, Thursday, February 9th, from 9:00–10:00PM PST. Blog*Spot will be unaffected.



We’re upgrading a database, which gives us more room to grow and will fix some transient comment problems that some of you have had recently.

NPR’s Story of the Day podcast recently included an All Things Considered story by Julie Zickefoose about how blogging has affected her relationship with her husband:

Bill and I now judge events in our lives as to whether they are blog-worthy. When we’re together, we have an unspoken agreement as to who gets to blog about whatever cool thing we encounter. … And he’s crestfallen if I haven’t read his entry before we go to bed. A remarkably specific ettiquette is emerging in this uncharted land.

Listen at Odeo.com, or download the MP3.

Us Blogger folks couldn’t be more excited that Measure Map, a slick and beautiful statistics app for blogs, has joined Google! Jeff Veen introduces himself on the official Google blog:

My first post to my blog was a little paragraph about my obsession with cycling, and I remember feeling a little ... let down. … It wasn't until someone left a comment that I was hooked. An audience! Someone is reading!



It was this feeling that led to the idea of Measure Map. Our goal has been to use the power of web analytics to help bloggers feel that same sense of connection with their audience. Today, as the Measure Map team joins Google, our mission remains the same: to build the best possible user experience so people can understand and appreciate the effect their blogs - their words and ideas - can have.

A small number of users are seeing a 553 Permission denied error when publishing to Blog*Spot. If this happens to you, logout of Blogger, clear your blogger.com cookies, and log back in. We are working to fix this problem.



Update, 2/21: This is now fixed.

We’re experiencing some problems with one of our databases. Some posts may not be saved, and other, saved posts, may not be visible in the app. Working on fixing this now…



Update, 12:44PM: This has been sorted out. We’re continuing to investigate the root cause and why our monitoring didn’t catch it sooner, but Blogger is back to functioning normally. Posts made from now on will be saved.



I’m very sorry to say that, if your blog was on this database, posts and template changes made in the last 18 hours or so were not saved. They may appear on your blog now, but will disappear if you republish. If you made a post between Friday afternoon and now, we suggest that you look at your list of posts (“Posting” tab, “Edit posts” sub-tab) and compare it with what is published on your blog. If posts are missing, copy them from your blog pages before you republish.



Major apologies to those of you who were affected. We work hard to maintain Blogger as a trustworthy place to keep your writing, and we really hate to let you down.

I’m really excited to introduce you to the Blogger widget, one of the three widgets for Mac OS X 10.4 now available on Google Labs. This li’l guy makes it even easier to post to your blog from your Mac: pop open the Dashboard (F12 usually works), type some text, press one of the alluring, shiny buttons, and then spend the next few minutes flipping widgets back and forth from front to back because the animation is so cool.



If you have multiple blogs, you can have multiple Blogger widgets open, each one tuned to its own blog. And, if space gets cramped, just click the blue title bar at the top of the widget to collapse it up, window shade–style.



Some handy widget tips:

• The text box works pretty much like Compose mode in the full editor on Blogger. You can type HTML tags in there, but also use ⌘-B to make words bold and ⌘-I to make them italic.
• If you start a post in the widget and then realize you need to add a picture or do something else that you need the full editor for, just save your post as a draft. A link will appear that’ll jump you right into Blogger to pick up your post where you left off.
• The widget checks periodically to see if there’s a newer version, so if we fix bugs or add new features you’ll be sure to know.
  
  
• Your password gets stored in the Keychain, so it’s nice and secure.

If you need any help or have any cool widgety ideas, we’ve set up a special Google Group for the Mac widgets. Don’t forget to check out the other two widgets, too: Gmail and Search History. They’re really slick and I think you’ll like them a lot.

Some users are currently getting “403 Forbidden” errors when viewing their blogs, and “Permission Denied” errors (or variations thereof) when publishing. You may recognize this problem from Monday.



The offending server is being replaced and then shot. We’ll let you know when things are back up. Shouldn’t be too long.



Until then, affected blogs will be unavailable and unpublishtoable.



Update, 5 minutes later: All fixed!