Author Archive

We’re doing some maintenance on one of our Blog*Spot servers. Some blogs will be inaccessible while this is going on. Everyone is able to publish, however, regardless of whether or not the blog is down for maintenance. We apologize to those blog owners who are affected by this. This partial outage is necessary to fix some of the transient Blog*Spot problems that have popped up recently. Update:

You may remember a certain scheduled outage when we removed a particularly hated piece of network equipment from Blogger’s production setup.



Today we finally got our hands on the beast.



Let these photos, and the following limerick, serve as a warning to any other piece of Blogger infrastructure that steps out of line.



There once was a router so crappy

That it made all the Bloggers unhappy

It caused pagers to be beep

And kept us from sleep

So we smashed it on the ground with golf clubs and threw paving stones at it and kicked it and someone filmed part of it but that’s not up yet and then we dropped it off a dumpster and kicked it again and gathered up the parts and sent them to be recycled quite snappy

Some of you may be seeing the “Blogger Problem” error page when you visit Blogger.com. If you see this, clearing your blogger.com cookies and trying again will resolve it (might take a few tries, though). Some of the servers are misbehaving, but we’re getting it all back in line now.



Update, 5:25: All sorted out.

We’re experiencing some intermittent slowness in our photo uploading infrastructure. If you’re patient, your photo may get uploaded before your browser times out. Folks are investigating and fixing. Update, 9:15: This has been fixed.

Way back in — one might say — the “D” “A” “Y,” when Blogger was made by Pyra, before Ev forgot how to read, and most people hadn’t heard about these new “web-enabled Internet log pages” (aren’t you glad people stopped calling them that?), there was the Blog of the Week. But it was a pain to keep updating. So, Ev went and made a new thing, Blogs of Note, and added it to the Blogger homepage. It

All publishing is broken right now. We’re working on fixing it.



Update, 10:15AM: We have Blog*Spot publishing working again. External publishing coming soon.



Update, 10:41AM: External publishing is working again as well. Plus users, we haven't forgotten about you.



Update, 10:50AM: Everything sorted out now and working fine. Expect possible transient slownesses as we shore up some of the quick fixes that we had to make.

Blogger.com will be down on April 24 2006 from 4 pm PDT to 4:45 pm PDT due to planned maintenance. We’re sorry about the one-two unplanned/planned outage punch today, but we need to do some database maintenance. You will still be able to view your blogs during the outage. Be assured that when Blogger.com comes back, it will be shinier and happier than ever.



Update: The maintenance is complete. Blogger is back to normal.

One of our most effective tools for preventing spam and automated abuse of Blogger is our word verification image. We require it to be solved to create a blog or post to blogs our automated spam classifier catches, and offer it as an option for you to include on the comment form on your blog.



Word verification (sometimes called a CAPTCHA™) is designed to be a simple puzzle that a human can solve easily but a computer cannot. Sadly, that has not been the case for Blogger. A ton of humans cannot solve our word verification simply because they cannot see it.



Today we’re very happy to add an audio verification alongside every word verification in Blogger. Now almost everyone will be able to create blogs, post comments, and prove to our spam classifier that they’re not a robot.



If you cannot see a word verification image, or if you just want to change things up a bit, click the accessibility icon next to the text field to hear a series of digits. Just type what you hear (in Javascript browsers we set the form field focus automatically) and you’ll be good to go.



If you’re having trouble hearing the audio, try the tips in this help article. We’ve found that the QuickTime plug-in works well for playing the required WAV file. Also, the digits will be spoken in your preferred language. Go to our choose language page to set yours if you haven’t already.

Currently some users are getting “No route to host” errors when publishing to Blog*Spot. We’re looking into this. In the mean time, logging out and clearing cookies should relieve the problem.



Update, 6:45PM: All sorted out. Apologies to those folks who were affected by this during the afternoon.

Right now we’re having problems with blog publishing. Affected users will see the publish status page hang at 0% complete. Our engineers are investigating.



Update, 3:55: All seems to be back to normal. If you weren’t able to publish before, go to the “Status” subtab and republish. No posts were lost. Apologies to all of you who were affected, and to your readers as well.