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Thursday, August 6, 2009

Google Blogger

History

Blogger was started by Pyra Labs in August 1999. Although it was not the first blogging platform, it is credited for popularize blogging by making it easy. Pyra Labs was bought over by Google in February 2003, who then added premium features and it was free to use. Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features including CSS-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by email in May 9, 2004. Blogger introduce Blogger Beta in 14 August 2006, gave notice that all bloggers must eventually migrate to the new version. It added many new features especially the long-awaited categories (which they called Label), plus a LAYOUT with drag-and-drop features which allow blogger with practically no knowledge of HTML to easily customize their blogs. Blogger Beta came out from the beta stage in December 2006 became New Blogger or just plain Blogger. It offers people to set up blogs for free at blogspot.com using sub-domains. Blogs using blogspot.com are hosted free by Google. It is the most popular blogging platform with a huge number of blogs and the numbers are still increasing very quickly.

You can create a blog very quickly by going to http://www.blogger.com and creating an account. If you are not fussy, you can get a blog up on the web within 5 minutes or even less. You can get some help from Dummies Guide to Google Blogger. If you want something more, bloggers have found Blogger Tips and Tricks very informative and helpful with lots of good tips. See the comments left by grateful bloggers at Comments left by grateful readers of Blogger Tips and Tricks.

Custom domain

In January 5, 2007, Blogger introduced custom domain which allow you to register your own domain and use it for your Blogger blog. Blogger will still host your blog for free plus redirect all traffic from your old blogspot.com site to the new domain. You can also chose to host the blog on your own and use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to publish your blog, but you will have to use the old classic Blogger templates. The New Blogger templates plus its new features will not be available to you.