Author Archive

With several Twitter fans on the Blogger team (not to mention a number of Blogger alumni work at Twitter), it seemed only natural that we set up shop on Twitter ourselves. We will be posting status updates, major feature announcements, and pointers to cool uses of Blogger will all show up in our Twitter account. We will do our best to keep an eye on replies to @blogger as well, but our Help Center and Blogger Discussion Group remain the best places for help from fellow users as well as the Blogger support team.

The fact that there are tens of thousands of results for "blogger's block" suggests that more than a few of you have struggled to think of what to say on your blog at one time or another. If that sounds like you, you might want to take a look at Plinky. Plinky is the brainchild of one of the original Blogger team-members, Jason Shellen, and we've enjoyed seeing what people have come up with in the first few weeks of answering Plinky prompts.

What's a Plinky prompt? Glad you asked! Here's their explanation:

Every day we provide a prompt (i.e. a question or challenge) and you answer. We make it simple to add rich media and share your answers on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Not only does Plinky provide help with what to post to your Blogger blog, but it also helps your answers look good in the process. Depending on the prompt, answers contain rich media elements like maps, photos, lists and cover art for books, movies and albums. It's easy to tell Plinky that you use Blogger and all your answers posted through Plinky can go right to your blog.

What are you waiting for? Go answer a prompt! (And say hi to Shellen while you're there.)

You may have noticed that about a week ago a new tab showed up in Blogger for your blog. The tab is called Monetize, and in case it isn't clear what that means: it's now easier than ever to make money with your blog! (There's also a "Monetize" link from your Dashboard as well.)

The current Monetize tab allows you to apply for an AdSense account (or link your Blogger blog to an existing AdSense account). You can then choose where to place ads on your blog, and once ads start appearing on your blog, review your earnings. We use the AdSense API to pull your live earnings data from your AdSense account, so now it's easy to check how your revenues are doing without leaving the Blogger interface.

Please note that new applications may take a few days to process, and not every site will be approved (for more on the eligibility criteria for an AdSense account, please see here). Details about the monetize tab and the information presented there is available in Blogger's Help section.

If you ask people why they blog, a lot of the answers you receive will probably center around the idea of starting conversations. I love talking with friends and family about the countries I've visited and the cities I've explored, and personal blogs are a great way to share these stories. However, I have never met someone who felt they had enough time to post all of the updates that they wanted, especially when they are off traveling. Well, wouldn't it be great if anytime you were traveling somewhere new, taking off on a road trip, or just on your way to an exciting place, there was a way for you to automatically publish that information to your blog? We thought so too, and that's why we decided to release the Google public location badge, powered by Google Latitude.

Bloggers who rely on our FTP service to publish their blog to their own domain had a rough week last week. In fact, it's been a bumpy month or two. Let's start with the most important comment on this state of affairs: this sucks, and we're sorry.

(Note: this is a lengthy post, and goes into a fair amount of technical detail. If you don't use FTP to upload your blog, you can skip this post. --Rick Klau, Blogger Product Manager)

If you use FTP today, I'd like to start a conversation about whether this is the right approach for your blog. I've been talking with bloggers over the last couple weeks on this subject, and have found most users, when presented with the option of hosting their blog using Blogger's Custom Domain option instead of FTP, find Custom Domains to be a far superior option. That's not to say there aren't compelling reasons to stick with FTP, so I'm not interested at this point in trying to convince everyone to switch over to Custom Domains. But I do think it is preferable for most of you still using FTP, and hopefully this post will help lay out why.

Advantages of Custom Domains Over FTP

First off, what is a Custom Domain? If you own a domain, we can host your blog at your domain instead of hosting at yourblog.blogspot.com. Unlike FTP, where you transfer the blog's files to a webserver hosted elsewhere, Google actually hosts the blog on our servers. So why would you want to start using a Custom Domain over FTP? When Blogger released Custom Domains a couple years ago, we pointed out a couple obvious advantages:

1) Simple setup.
2) Faster publishing. You no longer wait for files to transfer to your remote host; as soon as you click publish, the post is available and all archive pages are updated.
3) Drag and drop template editing. Blogger's newer templates offer you a lot more in terms of customization, and make designing your page a much simpler process.
4) Access control. You can restrict access to your blog when we host it; there's no way to do this natively within Blogger (though your webhost may offer a way to do this separately).

In light of the recent experiences with FTP, here's two more:

5) Fewer moving parts. As I've dug in over the last few weeks on issues relating to FTP, as often as not the problems were not Blogger-related but were a byproduct of a webhost implementing stricter security on FTP logins (only whitelisting certain IP addresses, for instance, or throttling access for certain users). These are notoriously hard to isolate, particularly when they involve coordinating support with a third party. No one - including us! - enjoys the terrible back and forth of "it's the webhost's issue" "no, it's Blogger's issue" "no, we're pretty sure it's the webhost's issue" when all you want is to be able to post to your blog.
6) Free, scalable hosting. Google knows a thing or two about hosting content around the world, and by relying on Blogger for hosting you're getting the advantage of a robust hosting environment - for free!

Twitter Feedback: Why do you prefer FTP?

Enough generalizations. On Saturday, I asked users on Twitter to tell me why they preferred FTP over Custom Domains. I've listed the first few responses below, along with my thoughts:

• @creuzerm: "I can easily back up my site via my backup scripts over FTP." (@cjewel and @Vin07 made similar points.)
• Blogger users have a one-click backup option from the Blogger dashboard (Click Settings | Basic, then click "Export blog"). Unlike file backups from a remote webhost, Blogger's export (details here) does a full export of all posts, comments, the current layout, and your Blogger settings. At any time, you could recreate the entire blog with a single upload, and restoring the blog on a Custom Domain would take seconds (unlike FTP, which could take hours for larger blogs to transfer all of the necessary files). If you ever wanted to migrate off of Blogger, our conversion utilities will help you convert from Blogger's export file to most other popular blog formats. (Come to think of it, if you haven't backed up your blog lately, why don't you do that right now?)
• @lizcastro: "FTP lets you get rid of the NavBar and better control of your branding."
• There is no difference between control/branding between Custom Domains and FTP. In fact, you get more control over the look and feel of your template, with a more sophisticated, point-and-click interface to adding interactive gadgets - all of which are draggable in the template editor to get the exact placement and layout you want. If you choose to remove the navbar, there are several sites that walk you through the few steps necessary to remove it. We'd prefer you didn't - it helps users find your site, it makes it easier for users to search your blog, and we have several enhancements planned for the navbar this summer. But if you insist on removing it, a search for "remove Blogger navbar" will point you in the right direction. (Obviously, this is not supported and we can't provide support for any modifications you make to your templates.)
• @eccentriclee: "I feel better having access to all files directly." @lizcastro: "FTP allows you more control over uploading things to your own server (or seems to) and uploading images with Blogger is cumbersome."
• As detailed below, I have what I think is the best of both worlds: Blogger manages the hosting of my site (at a subdomain, tins.rklau.com), and I retain access to my webhost for file uploading (at www.rklau.com). Regarding image uploading, when you switch away from FTP, you get our integration with PicasaWeb, where you can host images. This tends to be a much more powerful way of managing uploaded images (all uploaded images are stored in a Picasa album for future reference).
• @nomadness: "FTP lets me keep /blog inside long-established site hierarchy with other content at root."
• This is a valid concern if the custom domain you choose is the same as the domain you currently use for FTP (i.e., you FTP to www.yourdomain.com/blog and want to use www.yourdomain.com for your Custom Domain). In my case, I chose to leave www.rklau.com alone and instead have Blogger manage a subdomain as my Custom Domain. That's not the whole answer, however - there's still the matter of getting people from www.yourdomain.com/blog to blog.yourdomain.com. See "Redirecting..." below.
• @Vin07: "Afraid of posts being lost on switch..."
• I'd suggest a backup to eliminate any risk. But rest assured, no posts are lost in the switch.

There were two responses that are completely valid reasons for sticking with FTP:

• @haitai: "In China, the ghs.google.com always blocked by #GFW, FTP web host isn't." @johnroach: "Blogger sometimes gets blocked by Turkey and so does some internet sites."
• Yep, if a country blocks access to Google domains, and you or your audience is primarily in that country, then you'll want to host on a domain that's not blocked.
• @creuzerm: "I am planning on doing a PHP blog template."
• If you absolutely need to execute PHP within your template's pages, you'll have to host on a domain where PHP is installed and supported. Of course, there are a ton of gadgets that can add functionality to your site, so you may be able to do what you need without adding custom code. (On the "Layout" tab for a Blogspot or Custom Domain-enabled blog, click "Add a Gadget".)

One note: if you do stick with FTP, we'd strongly recommend checking with your webhost to see if they support SFTP - it's much more secure than FTP.

Redirecting from your FTP blog to your Custom Domain blog

OK. Let's assume that you've read this far, and have decided that you want to give a custom domain a try. If your blog has been around a while, you'll be concerned about links to your soon-to-be old URL.

I started my blog on Blogger in 2001, using Blogger's FTP service to publish to www.rklau.com/tins/. At the time, that was the only way to use Blogger to manage my blog on my own domain. I later switched to Movable Type (retaining the same URL), and then migrated to WordPress in 2005. Back in November, in anticipation of joining the Blogger team, I moved back to Blogger. After chatting with the Blogger team, I knew I wanted to take advantage of many of the new features on Blogger - but because I had a ton of images and files on www.rklau.com that I'd uploaded over the years, I didn't want to map www.rklau.com to Blogger.

My answer? I moved the blog from www.rklau.com/tins/ to tins.rklau.com. I created a CNAME for tins.rklau.com that maps to Google, and now Blogger hosts the blog. All of the old posts with pointers to files and images at www.rklau.com continue to work. I documented how I use WordPress to redirect requests from the old posts to the new ones here. If you're moving from FTP to Custom Domains, then there's one last step - redirection - to ensure that requests to the former URLs find your new URL.

How you implement the redirection depends on what kind of server you're hosting on. If you're on an Apache webserver (most common) then you'll want to use something called htaccess. If you're on an IIS server and you don't manage the server yourself, you will need to talk to the webhost to get the redirect in place.

To create an htaccess file, first create a text file which includes the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://blog.yourdomain.com/$1

This assumes your blog is published to /blog, and that your new Custom Domain is blog.yourdomain.com - change those values as appropriate. Now upload this file to your webserver, and name it ".htaccess" (no quotes, but the period preceeding "htaccess" is important) in the root directory. All this does is take incoming requests to files in the /blog directory, and redirect them to blog.yourdomain.com, while keeping the rest of the URL intact. Since Blogger will keep the same permalinks in the migration, this will preserve all inbound link traffic.

To all of you who continue to rely on Blogger as your blogging platform: thank you.

Many of you have asked about Blogger templates. You've posted in the help forums, you've tweeted, one of our engineers actually got stopped in a coffee shop to talk about Blogger's classic templates. And by "classic" we mean "old". We found that many of you weren't aware of a wealth of third party sites offering quality Blogger templates, so we wanted to share some recommendations from your fellow bloggers about where they go for improved templates that work with Blogger.

Earlier this week, I asked you for your recommendations, and a number of you responded. In no particular order, here's what you suggested:

• BTemplates. A free directory of user-submitted templates, classified by type and/or features.
• The Cutest Blog on the Block. Run by Becky and Ashley of 2 Moms Talk, this site offers free, premade layouts, as well as customizable backgrounds.
• Blogger Styles. Gallery of submitted templates, ranked by visitors and includes detailed configuration instructions.
• FalconHive. Conversions of WordPress templates upon request, along with archive of past conversions.
• All Blogspot Templates. Templates in 1-, 2- and 3-column options. Also includes AdSense-ready templates.
• Zona Cerebral. Spanish site with dozens of templates to choose from, including several converted WordPress themes.
• Quite Random. A number of free templates, and several Blogger-specific tutorials regarding setup and layout editing.
• ChicaBlogger. In Spanish, templates designed primarily for women.
• Deluxe Templates. Hundreds of templates, including many converted WordPress themes. Also has a nice "tips & tricks" section for customizing Blogger.
• Pyzam. Thousands of templates, browsable by category and sortable by recency or popularity.
• Our Blog Templates. 160+ free templates, all well-labeled for easy browsing to find the one you want.
• eBlogTemplates. Combination of free and premium templates, and a wealth of tips for tweaking your Blogger blog.

Note: for the most part, sites above provide templates for Blogger's "Layouts". If you still see a "Templates" tab for your blog, you need to upgrade your blog to take advantage of these new features. This help article has some more information about using Layouts.

Finally, cheth shared a recent post he wrote where he finds his favorite templates (many taken from the sites above). It's a good overview, and gives you a good visual indication of just how varied Blogger templates can get.

Now would be a good time to remind you that before you make any changes to your template, you should download the current template and put it in a safe place. (Click "Layout", then "Edit HTML" and then "Download full template".) And just in case it's not clear from this post: every link above points to a third party site. Blogger cannot provide support for independently created templates. If you choose to use a template built by someone else, make sure to figure out how easy it is to reach them if problems arise.

We'll have more to say about Blogger templates later this summer; in the meantime, thanks to everyone who shared a recommendation. We hope the list above gives you some variety when picking the next design for your blog!

We're always looking for tools to make blogging easier, and a number of us on the Blogger team have become big fans of Zemanta. Zemanta is a browser plug-in for Firefox and IE, and is available as a bookmarklet for Chrome and Safari. (More details here, you can download your version of Zemanta here.)

Here's how it works: while you write your blog post in Blogger, Zemanta opens up a sidebar next to the Blogger post editor. After you've written a few sentences, Zemanta analyzes the words in your post and suggests images and video that are relevant to your post; with one click, it inserts them into your post. (The Zemanta screenshot from Flickr in this post was inserted with just that one click.)

In addition, Zemanta looks for words/phrases it's familiar with, and makes it easy to link those words to URLs it knows about. The phrases appear immediately below the post editor in Blogger, and by clicking on them you automatically create the links Zemanta recommends. No more highlighting text, clicking "Link", pasting the URL - just click the words you want linked, and Zemanta handles the creation of the link - to webpages, maps, videos or pictures.

Blogger Labels are easier to use with Zemanta, too: Zemanta automatically suggests labels for your based on the text of your post, and creates the labels for you if you like. Finally, "Latest Update" gives you a list of blog posts from other blogs writing about similar topics. It's a great way to discover sites talking about similar topics, and if you'd like to point your readers to those articles for further reading, clicking on them in the sidebar inserts them as "Related reading" links at the bottom of your post (see below).

If you have a few minutes, the following video review by Blogger user Plug in SEO does a good job covering how Zemanta helps save you time while enhancing your blog posts. The blog post accompanying the reivew is also worth a read.



We'll keep our eyes open for other tools that make your blog better. Stay tuned!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Make Your Blog Posts Better (lockergnome.com)
• Zemanta Spreads To Safari, Chrome, Opera (mashable.com)
• Zemanta - the Coolest Application for Bloggers I Have Seen (change-management-blog.com)
• Blog More Effectively With Zemanta (bloggingot.com)
• Zemanta - Cutting out the middle man. (toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.)

Google's about to have its second tenth birthday. In late August, Blogger will officially turn 10 years old. As our birthday draws near, we thought it would be interesting to share some fun facts about Blogger:

• Every minute of every day, 270,000 words are written on Blogger
• Millions of people worldwide use Blogger to publish to their blog each week
• Almost two thirds of Blogger's traffic comes from outside North America (What's the #2 country after the U.S.? Brazil, followed by Turkey, Spain, Canada, and the U.K.)
• The most popular sport for our bloggers? Soccer (that's football to the rest of the world), more than four times larger than the #2 sport, baseball

While we're really excited about this milestone, we want the focus to be on you and the remarkable stories that you and millions of people around the world document on Blogger. After all, blogs are one of the true building blocks of the web, constantly updated not only with news and personal stories, but any kind of information you can imagine. Just this week, there's an Iranian student documenting the minute-by-minute proceedings in Iran, while a British woman is uploading nightly blog posts from her satellite phone while rowing solo from Hawaii to Australia, while an American college student is running from Amsterdam to Athens with nothing but the pack on his back. There are literally millions more.

What's your story? Did your blog help you find a job? Learn a language? Interact with your fans? Master a new skill? Battle an illness? Turn a hobby into a career? We read as many blog posts as we can, and what we do read is often brilliant. But we want to know more — we want to hear from you about what Blogger has meant to you over the past decade.

Do what you do best: tell your story. Write a post, and then let us know about it by filling out this form. Keep an eye on Blogger Buzz, where we'll be sharing some of our favorites over the coming weeks.

To the millions who have depended on Blogger to help you tell your story, thank you. To those of you who have yet to tell your story, creating a blog couldn't be easier: just visit blogger.com to get started. We can't wait to see what the next ten years bring — and stay tuned for details about the tenth birthday itself.

Periodically, we profile a Blogger partner that can add functionality to your blog. This week we'd like to spotlight Lijit, a company building "search powered web applications for publishers" (that's you!). Lijit has made adding its "wijit" as easy as could be—just fill in your blog's URL and complete the sign-up wizard, you'll be good to go.

What does Lijit give you? For starters, Lijit provides a nice search tool for your site that will not only search your blog, but search the blogs of your friends, and all of the related sites (Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc.) that you and your friends use regularly.

Where Lijit shines is in the stats they gather for you: what are people searching for when they come to your blog? Once they arrive, what do they then look for? Where are they coming from? How has search traffic changed over time?

Best of all, Lijit lets you expose this info via a customizable "wijit" so that your visitors can see where other visitors are coming from and what they are looking for. To see this in action, take a look at Dark UFO's Lost Spoilers site, a Blogger blog focused on unraveling the mysteries surrounding the TV show Lost. The Lost Spoilers wijit shows not only the most recent searches that have brought visitors to the Lost Spoilers site:


It also shows a map of their visitors:


And finally it shows a list of the most recent visitors, their locations, and if they used a search to visit the site, the search term they used:


Interested? Give Lijit a try - just visit their site and you'll have it on your blog in just a few minutes!

A few months ago we mentioned that Blogger was turning 10 years old later this year. That day is almost upon us — just six days away in fact — and we've been hard at work trying to think about what we could give you to celebrate.

Wait, what? What we could give you? That's right. This is our birthday — but we're celebrating your contributions over the years. Over the past decade, millions of people around the world have made Blogger what it is today: a vibrant community of real people telling their stories. When we asked you to tell us your Blogger story, you responded: you connected with far away family, shared your art, grew up, demonstrated your expertise in an emerging area of research, overcome childhood adversity, met authors and poets you admire, coped with an illness, became a parent, learned a new culture, struggled with your parents' divorce, placed digital messages in virtual bottles, helped people fix their cell phones, wrote a novel. You even made the inaugural blogging team at school, and while there you're working on your PhD on consumer trends towards blogs. There are millions of such stories — and they grow by the day.

As we turn ten, we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features on Blogger. Some presents are because you asked for them this spring. Other presents are because they meant a lot to us. And some are because our friends (both inside and outside of Google) wanted to chip in and give you something. In short, it's a lot like a real birthday: you won't necessarily want or need every present that you get, but keep in mind: it's the thought that counts!

We're excited to share this milestone with you. Stay tuned, the next several weeks will be a lot of fun!