What is Blogger ?

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via custom URLs.

History

On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format. In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features (for which Pyra had charged) to become free. In October 2004, Pyra Labs' co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google. In 2004, Google purchased Picasa; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.

On May 9, 2004, Blogger introduced a major redesign, adding features such as web standards-compliant templates, individual archive pages for posts, comments, and posting by email. On August 14, 2006, Blogger launched its latest version in beta, codenamed "Invader", alongside the gold release. This migrated users to Google servers and had some new features, including interface language in French, Italian, German and Spanish. In December 2006, this new version of Blogger was taken out of beta. By May 2007, Blogger had completely moved over to Google operated servers. Blogger was ranked 16 on the list of top 50 domains in terms of number of unique visitors in 2007

Available languages

Blogger is available in these languages: Arabic, Bengali, Indonesia, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Designs available

The Blogger allows its users to choose from various templates available. The New Design templates known as Dynamic views were introduced recently and these allow the users to change between different dynamic views available. Some of the widgets (e.g. Blog List, Link List, Subscription Links, Followers, Blog Archive etc) are available for Dynamic Views. But the other templates are chosen by the blogger.

Limitations

Blogger has the following limitations on content storage and bandwidth, per user account:

Blog description = 500 characters. HTML mark up not supported.
Number of blogs = 100 blogs per account.
Number of labels = 2,000 unique labels per blog, 20 unique labels per post
Number of pictures (hyperlinked from user's Picasa Web Album) = Up to 1 GB of free storage
Number of posts = There is no limit on the number of posts one can have in one blog.
Size of pages = Individual pages (the main page of a blog or archive pages) are limited to 1 MB
Size of pictures = If posted via Blogger Mobile, limited 300 KB per picture; posted pictures are scaled to 1600px
Stand-Alone Pages = Limited to 20 stand-alone pages.
Team members (those who can write to a blog) = 100 per blog.

On February 18, 2010, Blogger introduced "auto-pagination", which limited the number of posts that could be displayed on each page, often causing the number of posts on the main page to be less than that specified by the user and leading to a hostile response from some users.

Private blogs are limited to only 100 members. A member of Blogger's staff (Brett from Blogger) recently stated that Blogger's private blog limit is 100 readers is because



Source : wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)