Blogger

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, by MultiMedia

Blogger is a service created by Pyra Labs that provides Web-based tools used by individuals to publish to the Web. Pyra Labs is now owned by Google.

The tool Blogger is a service to make weblog publishing easier. The user does not have to write any code or to worry about installing server software or scripts. Nevertheless, the user can influence the design of his or her blog freely.

Blogger allows for the hosting of the blogs on its own Blogspot or on the server of the blogger's choosing (via FTP or SFTP). While most web browsers are supported, Mozilla Firefox is used internally by all Blogger staff. Blogger advises its users, especially AOL users, to switch to Mozilla Firefox in order to have the best possible experience using Blogger.

History

Launched in August 1999, it is one of the first dedicated blog-publishing tools and is credited for helping popularize the form. More specifically, instead of hand-coding posts in HTML and frequently uploading new posts, the user can make posts to the weblog by submitting a form on the Blogger web site. This is possible with any web browser and the results immediately show up on the site.

Blogger was started by Pyra Labs. In 2003, the search engine company Google, Inc. acquired Pyra Labs and in doing so, Blogger. Google provided the resources that Pyra needed. Furthermore, formerly premium features that needed to be paid for were made available for free with Google’s help. About a year later, Pyra Labs' co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google.

Google purchased Picasa (an image software maker) in 2004 and its photo sharing utility Hello, integrating the latter with Blogger, thus allowing users to post photos to their blogs. Thus photoblogging became a reality with the integration of Blogger and Hello.

On May 9, 2004, Blogger relaunched with a redesign in collaboration between web design firms Adaptive Path and Stopdesign, adding features including CSS-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by e-mail.

Features

Google launched a section called BlogThis! on their Google toolbar and added a link for non-supported computers to use the BlogThis! tool. BlogThis! is an easy way to make a blog post without visiting blogger.com. Once you add the BlogThis! link to your browser's toolbar, blogging will be a snap. Or rather, a click. Clicking BlogThis! creates a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post from within BlogThis!

On August 16, 2005, Google launched Blogger for Word, a free add-in for Microsoft Word. This add-in allows users to save a Microsoft Word Document directly to a Blogger blog, as well as edit their posts both on- and offline.

Recently, Biz Stone, another well-known member of the Blogger team left the company.

BlogThis! Window

See also

• List of Google services and tools

External links

• Blogger Website
• Interview with Pyra Labs co-founder Meg Hourihan
• Interview with Pyra Labs co-founder Evan Williams

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This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.