I am overjoyed to announce that today we have o’ficially graduated the new version of Blogger from “in beta” to “.” Why is this significant? Allow me to explain via analogy:

Battlestar Galactica with Lorne Greene : Battlestar Galactica with Edward James Olmos :: Old Blogger : New Blogger

The new version of Blogger is metaphorically bursting with features, from the big guns like drag-and-drop template editing and post labels (which are perfect, by the way, for indexing the 131 historical figures you may have written about), to little polishes like a better-designed Dashboard or that you no longer need to solve a word verification CAPTCHA to post a comment on your own blog.

We’re excited about the new version of Blogger, both for what it can do now (which also includes access control for blogs and better input fields for post dates) and what we’ll add to it in the future, now that we have a new, stable, powerful infrastructure to work with. We’re done with “beta,” but we’re far from done with the new Blogger.

It’ll still take a bit more transition time to move everyone from the old version to the new, so for now we ask on our homepage which version of Blogger you use. If you’ve been using the beta, either because you switched or because you created your account after 10 November 2006, click “New Blogger” and sign in with your Google Account.

If you haven’t yet switched, click “Old Blogger” and use the same Blogger account you’ve always used, or — and this is the better choice — click “Switch Now” button*. After you sign in with or sign up for a Google Account (free!), you’ll be switched over to the new Blogger, which is both reassuringly the same (your blogs will keep the same URLs, and your templates and profile will be the same too) and significantly better (see above sampling of new features and comparisons to a masterful science fiction television program).

Finally, shouts out to all of the people and teams who have made this possible; the new Blogger is the combined effort of engineering, QA, support, management, product, marketing, PR, infrastructure, [music swells] design, partners, clients, users, hackers, Blog*Stars, cats, dogs, ferrets, and everyone and everything else that helped, assisted, or enabled. Thank you!

* = Update, 12/20: If you don’t see the “Switch Now” button on the homepage, it’s because a ton of people are already switching to the new Blogger, and we only let so many run simultaneously in order to give everyone a good experience. Just log in to old Blogger for now, and we’ll give you a heads up on your Dashboard when we’re ready for you.

A fellow Googler just let us know that her friend Aaron is currently blogging his Peace Corps experience from Togo, West Africa. In his own words:

"Take a peak at the trials and tribulations of a techie in Togo at aaroninafrica.blogspot.com. It's the stories, pictures and videos of a Peace Corps computer geek trying to spread the good news of computers in a mid-sized city in Togo, West Africa. The blog is smart and funny, and offers fun cultural insights and tidbits. From reporting on moving, cross-cultural moments to describing the big to-do when a new traffic light was installed, to up-close and personal interactions with his Togolese friends and neighbors, Aaron's blog opens a window on the society and culture in which he has immersed himself. Read about the computer center he is setting up in "Project," in which he hopes to provide affordable computer access to his community. If you like the idea, he is looking for people to help fund it."

Just before the weekend we added the final piece to the transition from old Blogger to the new Blogger in beta: members of team blogs can now switch to the new Blogger. This is the last step before we take the new Blogger out of beta.

Team blogs move when the blog’s original creator moves to the new Blogger. When that happens, team blog members will also have to move to the new Blogger in order to post. Team blog members don’t have to wait, though! If you move to the new Blogger, team blogs you didn’t create will still show up on your beta Dashboard. You’ll be able to post with them as before, though they won’t have the new features of the new Blogger. We wrote a help article to explain this all in a bit more depth.

At this point, the pieces are in place:

• The new Blogger is feature complete
• All new accounts are created on the new version
• Known issues on the new Blogger are few and getting fewer
• (Almost*) all users are able to move their blogs to the new Blogger

This all means that we’ll be removing the “beta” from the new Blogger very soon! At that time, we’ll begin the process of requiring that users of old Blogger move to new Blogger.

* = From time to time we may limit switching in order to keep old and new Blogger functioning smoothly. Also, users with particularly large blogs may not switch right now. This latter restriction will be gradually lifted.

If you happen to be a foodie, and enjoy reading foodie books, you've probably got a copy of On Food and Cooking somewhere on a nearby bookshelf. It's written by a wonderful man named Harold McGee, who just happens to hang out here at Google every now and then. (lots of food stuff goes on here, in addition to all the geeky stuff).

A little while ago Harold was telling me about all the supplemental research and material he has, that just won't quite fit into revisions of his book or his New York Times pieces. I suggested that he start a blog using the beta, and soon News for Curious Cooks was born!

He was particular interested in the beta's Label feature, which lets him categorize posts with labels like flavor, nutrition and vegetables. He's also even tweaked the layout himself with the beta's super easy-to-use Layouts feature. If you'd like to subscribe to Harold's blog in your favorite newsreader, here's the feed. Happy cooking and food-blogging!

Eric Case, of Blogger and Google Developer Relations, chatted with noted videobloggers Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson about videoblogging, the history and future of Blogger, and the “changing engines in midflight” that is moving to the new version of Blogger.


If you’re interested in getting started with videoblogging, Ryanne and Michael Verdi have a series of video tutorials on how to create a free videoblog using Blogger at Freevlog.org.

Today we’re saying goodbye to Steve Jenson, who is leaving Blogger and Google. SteveJ — seen here with his backing band — has worked on Blogger, first at Pyra and then at Google, for the past five years: coding it, fixing it, keeping it alive, and making it better. (By now he's likely worked on it as long as Ev did, which is no small feat!)


(Blogger Family Photo, 2/2003; SteveJ's toward the right)

We say thanks for Blogger, because the site would not even be around today were it not for Steve’s dedication and skill.

We’re going to miss you lots, Steve.

— Pete, Eric, and the rest of the Blogger team

From the Google Blog:

You might have noticed from the Google homepage that today is World AIDS Day. We want to remember all those who have suffered from HIV/AIDS in the 25 years since it was first identified, and we want to support everyone working to eradicate this scourge: Today, there are about 40 million people living with HIV worldwide, and it is increasing in every region in the world. In Africa, it is the leading cause of death -- 5,500 Africans die each day from this insidious disease.

One effort that is making a difference is (RED), a company founded this year by Bono and Bobby Shriver. A percentage of the profits from each (RED) product sold is given to The Global Fund. We are supporting the (RED) effort by offering promotional support to (RED) and (RED) products on Google properties throughout the holiday season.

We hope you choose to support them with your purchases. Companies offering (RED) products have committed to contribute a portion of profits from the sales of that product into Global Fund-financed AIDS programmes in Africa.

Together, let's make a big difference. Read more at JoinRED.com or visit the (RED) blog.

Raise awareness of the World AIDS Campaign by adding a ribbon or World AIDS Day badge to your blog. If you're using the new Layouts templates in new version of Blogger in beta, use one of the buttons below to put an image on your blog in just two clicks. Or, add the badge to your website with these instructions.

With those of us in the U.S. about to celebrate Thanksgiving, it's a good time for us to express a bit of appreciation. In that spirit, I'd like to second Jordan's shout-out to some of our enthusiastic Blogger Help Group members:

We have a nice little community of Bloggers here and I'm happy to see our membership continue to grow each day. This group is here for you, Bloggers, to get help and trade tips, and I believe we have a few individuals who go above and beyond the call of duty to help folks out. That's right, we've got a few Blog*Stars (the official term) amongst us, and each of them deserve recognition. Chuck (Nitecruzr), Ron (Rat), Peter (Enviroman) and Rose (Swtrose), I'd like to thank you for the help and dedication you've shown in this group. You, my friends, are officially dubbed Blog*Stars.

Thanks to all these folks, and to everyone else who's helped to make the group not only a useful resource but the cool new hangout for our bloggers. (Including you, Jordan!)

From Michael Bolin’s post on the GData APIs blog:

For those of you who have been trying to build client-side GData mashups but have been thwarted by the same-origin policy, we have some good news for you: you can now get public Base, Blogger, and Calendar feeds as JSON! This means that you can start displaying GData in your web page with a little JavaScript.

This means you can take any feed from the new version of Blogger, add alt=json-in-script and callback query parameters, and get a JSON representation of the feed that you can manipulate with JavaScript on any web page.

If you hack up something cool, post about it on the discussion group or link to this post so we’ll see it in the backlinks. Extra points if you share it as a widget with our new Add to Blogger API.

Today we’ve reached another milestone in our transition to a better Blogger: all new accounts are being created on the new version of Blogger in beta. This hugely exciting for us, because now all new users will get the benefits of the new Blogger, the foremost among them being drag-and-drop template editing, post labels, and privacy controls.

Getting started with Blogger is as easy as ever: create a Google Account (or sign in with your Google Account if you already have one), give your blog a name, and choose a template for it.

Clarifying note: You can still create a new account on the old Blogger if you need to claim a mobile blog, join a team blog, or are using a language we haven’t added to the new version of Blogger.

Update, 11/12: Mobile blogs are now being created on the new version of Blogger as well! w00t!

Last week we added FTP publishing to the new Blogger in beta. Today we’re letting you switch your FTP-publishing blog from the current Blogger to the new Blogger in beta. If you’re eligible to switch your account (see restrictions), you’ll see a message on your Dashboard inviting you to do so.

As with everything else on the new version of Blogger, we expect that FTP publishing will be more reliable than it is on current Blogger. Nevertheless, there many variables in external publishing that are out of our control, so we can’t guarantee that Blogger will publish flawlessly to every hosting provider.

We can say that we’ve tested the new version’s FTP publishing with the four most popular hosting providers from current Blogger, and it works fine. In particular, we’ve worked with Your-Site to ensure that the recent publishing problems between current Blogger and their service are not present with the new version of Blogger.

We do recommend that, before you switch, you create an account on the new version of Blogger by signing in with a Google Account at http://beta.blogger.com/. Try creating a test blog there and verifying that it can publish to your hosting provider. You can then switch your current Blogger blog to this Google Account. Or, just ask around on the Blogger Help Group to find out if other people have had success publishing to your particular hosting provider.

If publishing to your hosting provider does not work — especially if it did work with the current Blogger — send a message to Blogger Support. We want to fix all FTP publishing problems that we are able to.

Extra tip: ask your hosting provider if they support SFTP. If they do, you should use it instead of FTP. It’s more secure than FTP and we’ve found that it will often work when FTP does not.

This morning's push marks a huge milestone for the version of Blogger in Beta - it's finally feature complete! Aside from its interface being available in French, Italian, German or Spanish (with more languages on the way), you can now publish blogs via S/FTP, a feature formerly available on the older version of Blogger. Beta's FTP functionality is significantly enhanced however -- it includes Label support!

If you use FTP on the older version of Blogger, you should definitely log into the beta and set up a test FTP blog to make sure it can publish properly to your ftp server. We did a ton of FTP testing on several different popular hosting services, but if you experience any publishing weirdness, let us know via the Contact form -- use the "Report a bug or problem" -> "I found a bug with Blogger in beta" selection to send in reports, 'cause we wanna fix the bugs ASAP.

Most importantly, the addition of FTP to the beta means that account migration will soon (like Really Really Soon) be available to all Blogger users -- it's currently just enabled for blogspot users. Thank you all for your patience with the recent outages and networking problems - they'll soon be a thing of the past!

-Eric and the Blogger Team

We're currently looking for bloggers to participate in a user study to improve our product. You've given us feedback and we've listened, and now we're looking for more. If you're interested (and if you've been maintaining a blog for at least 3 months), just fill out this form. We are especially looking for people in New York City and San Francisco Bay Area, but others are welcome as well!

P.S. Just to let you know, filling out the survey doesn't guarantee you'll be contacted.

P.P.S. Thanks in advance. Studies like this are immensely helpful, letting us make Blogger as fun and useful as possible for all of you.

It was a dark and stormy night. The air was quiet. Too quiet. Yet stormy. Suddenly, a beep rang out from a bedside pager. The engineer woke up, grabbing a soda to sharpen his senses. Blogger was down. He needed to bring it back up.

When I get the chance to write my pulp story of a gritty Blogger engineer struggling to keep the site alive, I may look back on this past week as a prime source of choice dramatic fodder. Until then, I, like many of you, will look upon this past week with irritation, disappointment, and maybe even a bit of anger.

You need to look no further than our status blog or perhaps your own experiences to know that Blogger had a significant number of unplanned outages this last week (forgive me my euphemisms?) and a handful of planned ones to clean up from the unplanned ones. It’s been a Murphyesque cavalcade of power failures, fileserver trouble, and wonky network hardware, and I hope you’ll believe me when I say that the Blogger staff is even more sick of it than you are.

First up, our apologies. We really regret these outages, which were a nuisance (or worse) to you. The past week’s performance was not representative of the kind of service we want to provide for you.

More importantly, though, what are we doing to prevent this in the future? Some good news:

• In the short term, we’re replacing quirky hardware and increasing our monitoring to stop problems before they start (forgive me my clichés?). This afternoon’s planned outage did just such a thing.
• In the long term, we’re developing a new version of Blogger with some great new features that is built on technology and hardware that has proven, Google-quality reliability. The current Blogger infrastructure is — albeit in a very Lincoln’s axe way — the same that Google acquired four years ago. Sure, we’ve built on it and expanded it significantly since then, but the truth is we’ve more than out-grown it. The new version is ground-up more scalable and less error-prone.
  

The news gets better: We foresaw the need for the long-term solution, well, a long time ago. Long enough ago that it’s almost done, and you can use it as the new version of Blogger in beta. If you can switch to it (see requirements) you really should. The new version of Blogger is better in almost* every way, including reliability. (It’s worth pointing out that none of this past week’s trouble affected the new version of Blogger or its blogs.)

It’s been a bad week for Blogger, and, as I hope you can tell, we’re not denying it. Instead, we have taken and will continue to take specific steps that make Blogger a more reliable, overall better service for you to use.

Oh, and as a final dogfoodish note, I’m pleased to point out that our status blog is now powered by the new version of Blogger. This means that we will be free of the Catch-22 of problems with the current version of Blogger preventing us from reporting about the problems with the current version of Blogger. (And we’ll fix that bug that makes it look like all the posts came from me. We’re on it.)

* The new version of Blogger is available only in English, which we will remedy very shortly. Also FTP publishing isn’t there yet, but that’s coming soon, too. Once these are in place, the new version will be better than the current version in every way.

There's a saying in the software industry -- it's always good to eat your own dog food. Wikipedia has a great article about this:

"... the company has not merely considered the value of the product for consumers (that is, whether the dog will eat the dog food), but actually is a consumer of the product. When properly executed, this can add a new level of sincerity to advertising and customer relations, as well as helping to shape the product."

Blogger is quintessentially Google dogfood. We use it to publish the main Google Blog, ad-related blogs like Inside AdWords and AdSense, product-specific blogs like those for Reader and Book Search, and even language-specific blogs like Google 한국 블로그 and Google Россия. At last count there were 37 Google blogs powered by Blogger, and even more are in the works.

So when I see posts like these from Michael, Phillip or Juan Carlos, I get somewhat disheartened. They may be missing an important point: because we are eating our own dogfood, Blogger becomes a better, more secure product.

The issues they raise (like the fake Google Blog post, which involved an API bug) typically get fixed and pushed live within hours of their discovery. The Google Blog deletion that Michael mentions was the result of an automated anti-blogspam process and a double-corner case involving a feature of Blogger we discontinued many years ago -- no actual users were affected. Andrea's accidental post on Blogger Buzz was simple human error. Those of us with multiple blogs have probably all made the same mistake at one point or another (Danny even mentioned doing it not too long ago):

"I can completely sympathize with this. About two weeks ago, I posted something to the Search Engine Watch Blog that I meant for my personal blog Daggle. Both use Movable Type, on completely different systems. But I had browser windows open to both of them and just picked the wrong one."

In conclusion, dogfood = yum, even when it has bugs! Blogger is powerful, secure, sophisticated -- and yet a tremendously easy to use tool that enables millions of people around the world to share their lives with each other on the web. And it's only getting better with age.

Want to add labels to all your old posts? There's a new labels management feature to make this easy. On the Edit Posts page, you can select batches of posts and add or remove labels to all the posts at once.


Let loose your internal librarian! Happy labeling.

We've made it really easy to put AdSense ads on your blog using the new Blogger in Beta. If you're using the new layouts-enabled templates, try out the new AdSense Page Element.

You can sign up for an AdSense account from within Blogger, if you don't already have one. We offer a variety of recommended color schemes for the ads, or you can customize the colors. To get started, go to the Template tab of your blog, click Add Page Element, and select AdSense. Learn more.

If you're not using the new layouts-enabled templates, you can still add AdSense to your blog by clicking on the AdSense subtab of the Template tab of your blog.

Check out the Google Earthlings blog! 5 Google folks (plus their dog Sparky) are participating in 24 Hours of Moab the weekend of Oct14-15, and are using their beta blog to document the whole thing. They've even got nifty integration going with Earth and Blogger Mobile:

One of the last features missing from the new version of Blogger in beta — posting photos directly from Google’s Picasa photo organizer — has been released today. Picasa’s BlogThis! button is the easiest, most convenient way to post photos from your Windows or Linux desktop to your blog, and now you can use this great (and free!) program with the new version of Blogger.


There are a few known issues that we are working to quickly resolve, but we know that Picasa users have been eagerly awaiting this feature and didn’t want to make them wait any longer. Happy photoblogging!

(Gerbil photo courtesy Cute Overload.)

If you're interested in Blogger template hacking-via-javascript, be sure to check out Google's AJAX Search API. While its home on Code contains a bunch of interesting sample apps for learning and tinkering, Google Engineer Mark Lucovsky recently published an ajaxy, bloggy playground on BlogSpot: http://ajaxsearch.blogspot.com/

Notable stuff:

• the sidebar's "Google Search" field searches multiple indexes (Web and BlogSearch), as well as individual sites (in this case the AJAX Search API blog, the Google blog and www.blogger.com) - you can customize all of these things
  
• the sidebar's "Video Search" field displays (and plays!) results inline
• links in the main blog section can dynamically link directly into the sidebar's embedded Map and Video boxes (try clicking the 'Sakana' and 'Jimi Hendrix' links)

Mark's post on the API's blog has further details about the tweaks and integrations.

If you whip up something nifty on your Blogger blog using the AJAX Search API, post about it and link to this post, so we can see it in the Backlinks. Thanks!

Update:

• Hoctro's Place has applied the above to Blogger beta - nice work!
• Hoctro also has a Blogger Beta Playground, so be sure to check out some of his neat hacks.
  
• Zizukabi has an AJAX Search Widget in his sidebar, though I don't read Korean so I'm not 100% sure about what he's saying. :)
• Mark Lucovsky posted a beta blog with the same functionality.
  

Update #2:

• Mark posted another AJAX Search API example, the Video Bar.
  

Do you remember the Blogger Mobile jingle? I am happy to report that we have added “the rest” to the new version of Blogger in beta.

If you have a mobile blog already, we’ll now let you switch over to the beta (if you meet the other criteria, that is). Then just keep sending your pictures and messages to go@blogger.com, and we’ll post them for you.

Already using the new Blogger? You can create a new mobile blog simply by sending an e-mail or MMS from your phone to go@alpha.blogger.com. The “alpha” tells us to create the blog on the new version of Blogger.

In this same release we’ve fixed some feed related things as well: comment feeds are now showing the latest comments, and pagination works, which solves this known issue. Also, feed URLs on the beta are now also served up from your blog’s domain in addition to from beta.blogger.com.

(just linking to a few notable blogs that crossed my path in the past few days)

1. The Boing Boing crew just launched a new blog on Blogger beta - the Boing Boing Digital Emporium:

"The four of us at Boing Boing love music, comics, videos, and books. We especially love them in digital format so we can store them on capacious hard drives, instead of cramming more things into our already overstuffed bookcases. And we super-extra especially love them to be DRM-free so we can read, watch, and listen to them on our MP3 players, on our handheld devices, on our computers, and in our cars."

"That's why we created the Boing Boing Digital Emporium, launching today. We'll be selling our favorite DRM-free digital goods and giving the the majority of the proceeds (minus the transaction charges imposed by Paypal and Payloadz) to the creators of those goods."

2. Blogger-powered news from Thailand is available from Bangkok Pundit and 19sep.

Ahoy sailors. The infamous pirate Edward Teach once wrote in his ship’s log (or “p’slog” in 18th century slang):

Such a day found one with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot; then all things went well again [cite]

Yar. Now, had Teach written this on a blog, his crew may have wanted to comment on it (“Pass me th’ bottle,” “when can we go back to Port Royal?,” “why’s the rum gone?,” &c.). Until today, they may have had a great deal of trouble, above and beyond the significant scarcity of reliable Internet access in 1718 colonial America. A pair of issues have plagued Blogger and the Blogger beta: Blogger users unable to comment on beta blogs, and beta users unable to comment on Blogger blogs.

For the benefit of time traveling pirates with hypothetical weblogs everywhere, these issues have been well and truly keelhauled. Get thee to commenting, w’ abandon!

I’m very pleased to announce that Flickr has added support for the new version of Blogger in beta! Now you can blog and post photos directly from Flickr to your beta blog. This is something that a ton of you have been requesting, and many thanks go to the Flickr folks for upgrading their site to work with the new version of Blogger. (The relevant known issue has been updated, if you’re keeping track.)

Flickr is using a secure authentication method made possible by the new Blogger’s use of Google Accounts. When you want to add a Blogger beta blog to Flickr, Flickr will redirect you to google.com to enter your username and password. Read more about granting access to websites.


Flickr (and other websites that support this technology) will never see your username or password; all of that information is kept securely on Google’s servers. In addition, these websites will only be authorized to post to your Blogger blog. They will not be allowed to access your seach history (if you save it, that is), your Gmail, your Google Checkout data, or any other part of your Google Account. If you ever want to deauthorize a website and disallow it from posting, you can revoke its access from your “My Account” page.

Remember, never enter your Google Account login information on a website not owned by Google!

In the past month we’ve made a number of changes to image uploading to detect and solve the problems that some folks have been having. The number of problem reports concerning image uploading have decreased substantially, so we know that we’re moving in the right direction. There are still some problems out there, however, and we’re committed to tracking them down and solving them.

To that end, we’ve just released an additional change on the Blogger beta site to show you thumbnails of your photos after you upload them:

We hope that this thumbnail feature will help us diagnose the remaining issues, in particular those where no error message pops up. If you still have image upload problems on the beta please report them to us so we can get them solved. Don’t forget to mention in your description whether or not you see the thumbnails!

One more thing: to get all the latest fixes make sure that you clear your browser cache.

I know it may sound cheesy for some frustrated bloggers but, happy photoblogging!

Some of our users have expressed concerns about the lack of up-to-date information on issues and bugs they’re seeing in the new version of Blogger in beta. What are the engineers aware of? What’s being worked on? And when have bugs been fixed? We’re addressing these questions with today’s launch of Known Issues for Blogger in Beta, a new blog that will contain fresh information about the status of issues and bugs that affect you.

While I am on the subject of communication, let me clarify the purpose of the various other communication channels that exist between the users and the Blogger Team:

• Support form: Users can report problems with the application here to the Blogger support team. Depending on the issue the support team will answer with either some pointers to self-help information, ask for more information, or — in case of a new issue — report it to engineers for resolution. Issues that affect a large group of users will be resolved promptly (meaning that an engineer will start to work on it right away) whereas problems that just apply a single blog or account may take a little longer to fix.
  
• Blogger Status: This venue is used by the Blogger Team to report production outages, such as database problems. This is not a place where we report known application issues.
• Blogger Buzz: This blog contains information about new product features on Blogger as well as posts about cool and interesting things that go on the blogosphere.
• Blogger Help Group: Here Blogger users help each other with gotchas, tricks, hacks, etc. The Blogger support and engineering teams monitor this forum and occasionaly post on issues of general interest, but it is not the goal of the Help Group to become an alternative to the Support form.

I hope this note helps to clarify at which site/blog to seek help in various situations. And many thanks to the good folks on the Blogger Help Group for their feedback, which helps us provide a better service for all users.

Many of us in the USA are celebrating Labor Day today, which marks the end of the summer and is generally a good opportunity to have a backyard barbecue. The Blogger team decided to celebrate Labor Day by doing some actual labor and fixed a couple of issues with the beta:

• users seeing error pages instead of their beta blogs will not see these errors anymore
• old-style archive links for migrated blogs work again, in addition to the new-style links
  

Thanks for helping us continue to improve the Blogger beta!

In his landmark book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman writes:

The human mind is exquisitely tailored to make sense of the world. Give it the slightest clue and off it goes, providing explanation, rationalization, understanding. … Well-designed objects are easy to interpret and understand. They contain visible clues to their operation. Poorly designed objects can be difficult or frustrating to use. They provide no clues–or sometimes false clues. They trap the user and thwart the normal process of interpretation and understanding.

With that, we say good-bye to the combined Blogger / Google Accounts sign-in box on our homepage. Functional? Quite (though not everyone believes me). Well-designed? Not a chance. We’ve listened to the problems with our combined login box, and we have a solution.

The new login choice on the homepage should relieve any Google Accounts–related login trouble you may have. And if you’re like me and still haven’t been able to switch to the beta, you’ll be happy to find that your password manager will stop trying to fill in your Google Account login information on Blogger.

Sincere apologies to everyone who was a victim of our bad design and had trouble or even couldn’t log in. We goofed on this one, and we’re sorry.

Blogger in beta initially launched without a few features -- it's still a beta version after all -- and it turned out that one of the ones folks missed the most was having an Edit HTML view for their templates in the new Layouts system. I can sympathize with that myself. Complete template control was one of the things that originally made me choose Blogger over the other available options almost four years ago (and yes, that was before I worked here). That kind of personalization and customization is important to us here at Blogger, so I hope no one thought this feature was gone for good.

I love the fact that we've got such cool new ways to just drag 'n' drop parts of your template around, and change fonts and colors with the click of a mouse. And that "shuffle blog colors" option can keep me entertained for hours. But still, there are times when you really just want to muck around in the code and nothing else will do. So for those of you who feel that way, have at it! Edit HTML is now available for Layouts.

One quick warning before you all dive in, though: The new template language is completely different from the old one. So even if you're used to working with classic templates, you'll need to learn some new tricks to directly edit the new templates for Layouts-enabled blogs. We've got some starter documentation on it, with more to come later. Personally, I recommend making a test blog to experiment on while you learn how it all works.

Have fun!

I'm saddened to have to do this again, but today we're saying our collective goodbyes to Jason Goldman, Mr. Goldtoe.net, who's been Blogger's phenomenal Product Manager for the past three and a half years. There's a blank line in title above, because you could fill it in with any aspect of Blogger's evolution at Google and be assured that Jason played a significant role in its development. Fortunately though, Blogger's future continues to be incredibly bright and we're looking forward to moving out of beta and into the exciting times beyond!

Good luck with with all your endeavors Jason, and thank you for all your time, energy, insights and the eternal entertainment.

-Eric and the Blogger Gang

On this day in 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger which Ev announced on his own blog. As you can see, Blogger was quite the looker back then.

From those humble roots, a bloggerish forest has grown. And a lot of what we continue to build today is informed by the philosophy of the original Pyra team.

For example, the idea of control. One feature of the new beta is the new photo removal tool. Anytime you go to delete a post with a photo, we'll show you the images associated with that post and ask whether you want to keep or remove them from the web. Handy.

In any case: Happy Birthday, Bloggers! Here's to 7 more.

(Oh, the birthday logo is a dog because of that whole "1 human year = 7 dog year" thing. And there should be more dogs in birthday hats, don'cha think?)

Thanks very much to everyone who has submitted feedback thus far on the new Blogger in beta! I wanted to give an update on: migration, login problems and more features.

1) Migration

The biggest thing we've heard thus far is "When can I get it!" Believe me, we want to let everyone move over to Beta as quickly as possible. While we continue to increase the number of eligible users, we are doing so in an incremental way.

This is important because our highest priority is protecting user data during the migration process. By taking the approach we have, we've been able to fix bugs before they affect larger numbers of users. As it stands now, only a very small percentage of users have been affected by migration issues and we have fixed most of those problems. If you have experienced a problem related to migration, let us know and we will fix it (and don't worry your blog posts are safe!)

2) Login trouble

Rather than migration errors, the biggest problem we've seen thus far is folks who have tried to log into Blogger and are concerned because they see an empty dashboard. In almost all cases, this is because users are unknowingly being logged into the Beta instead of the current version of Blogger. The login box on www.blogger.com now accepts Google Accounts; by using the auto-complete function of your browser's password manager, you may be logged into Beta instead of the current version of Blogger.

It's important to remember, if you get logged in and see an empty dashboard, check the address bar of your browser to see if it says beta.blogger.com. If it does, you'll need to log out and go to www.blogger.com. Be sure to enter your current Blogger username and password at www.blogger.com and you will see your current list of blogs.

If you've forgotten your current Blogger username and password, you can retrieve them using our forgot password page.

3) More features

A lot of folks have been wanting to use new features like Labels but with their existing template. Or there are folks who are looking for more fine-grained control than offered with the new Layouts system.

Fortunately, it's always been part of our plan to introduce a new Edit HTML system for Blogger in beta. This system will not only let folks have the degree of customizability they desire, but it will let you create templates that are customizable with the Layouts system. Right now we are finishing the first version of this system and will be introducing in the "days not weeks" timeframe.

We are also going to be adding FTP support to the new version of Blogger which will allow open up migration to our existing external users. As we've noted in the migration documents, some of the new features rely on the new dynamic serving capabilities of Blog*Spot. We won't be able to support all of those features for our FTP users. We do intend to continue to support FTP and also come up with ways to make it possible and desirable for those folks (which includes me) to come back to Blog*Spot.

Finally, I wanted to point out a feature of the new Blogger in beta that's available today, but hasn't been much remarked on in the many reviews of the new app: updated spellcheck. This is not surprising, as our existing spellcheck is so cumbersome that many folks are probably conditioned not to use it at all. But now our spellcheck is powered by the same great experience users have been enjoying in Gmail. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Alongside yesterday's Blogger Beta launch comes some great news for Blogger API developers — Blogger now has a Google Data API! This means:

• There's lots of great sample code in the Blogger/GData doc
• Downloadable Client Libraries are provided for both C# and Java developers
• Authentication is fully documented for both Installed Applications and Web Apps
• Your GData code should be easily reusable across other GData API apps, such as Calendar

Please post any questions/problems/etc. to the bloggerDev/Data API discussion list, so we can make sure to fix any bugs as quickly as possible — thanks!

Today we're launching a new version of Blogger in beta! You've been asking for ways to do more with your blog, and you can with this new release. With the beta you can:

• Categorize your posts with labels
• Control who can read your blog
• Change the appearance and content of your blog with your mouse instead of HTML

Take a look at the tour to see all the new things you can do (well, a lot of the new things ... they didn't all fit in the tour).

As we release this version, we're limiting the number of people who can switch over. (You'll see a link on your Blogger dashboard when you are able to move.) Eventually, of course, everyone will be able to transition their blogs to the new version. Thanks in advance for your patience as we roll it out.

If you can't wait, you can create a new account on the beta now and make a new blog to test out the new features. Because the new Blogger uses Google Accounts, you can use your existing Google login, or create a new one. (Later, you'll be able to merge your current and beta accounts, and have all your blogs in one place.)

We'll be posting more about the new version in the coming days, but for now, we really want to know what you think. You can post on the Blogger Help Group or via or feedback form.

A while back we mentioned that we've been working with Sony Ericsson to incorporate blogging into their new generation of cameraphones. Well, the k800 has started to hit the market and our friends in Sweden have a helpful graphic to explain how it all works.

Check it out!

It has been widely reported that Internet users across India are being blocked from accessing a number of blog hosting sites, including Blog*Spot. We are disappointed and a bit puzzled by these reports. We are also working to understand the situation, and are looking into what we can do to help resolve it.

A big thanks to the many bloggers in India and elsewhere who are investigating, reporting, and working to restore access.

That's right -- our friends at the homonymous BlogHer are getting ready for their second annual conference, which takes place on July 28-29 in San Jose, CA. Last year over 300 attendees learned about issues important to women bloggers, and this year the organizers are expecting double the number of people and sessions. A sampling of the second day's sessions:

• 7:00 - 7:45: Free Morning Yoga
  
• Blog Crushes: Caffeine and Birds of a Feather out by the pool.
• Is the Next Martha Stewart a Blogger?

Passes to the second day are still available (the first sold out), and if you happen to be wondering given the conference's name...YES, gentlemen are invited too!

Check out http://blogher.org/about-blogher-conference-06 for all the details.

Alex Epstein has a cool blog about screenwriting in which he gives advice, talks about what he's working on and recently tackled the most important question of our time: Why did Serenity fail to succeed in the box office?

Team Blogger has much love for Serenity and ecourages you to check it out. Also, Joss Whedon? You should come to lunch at Google.

Congrats to Blogger user F-train for winning the World Poker Blogger Tour 2006 Summer Tournament this past weekend in Vegas. I've been digging on poker blog scene for a while now and was stoked to see the number of folks rocking it on Blog*Spot.

Some recommendations include:

• Poker Wannabe
• Tao of Poker
• Party Poker Blog
• Sound of a Suckout
• Mean Gene

Nice to see folks getting together IRL to play some cards.

We recently heard from the folks at Mann Publishing that their new Blogger book has been released! Here's what it covers:

"With this book, you will learn how to use Blogger’s Post Editor and Dashboard to create sophisticated postings that include images and hyperlinks, and how to change the look and feel of your blog using templates. Other topics include making money using Google’s AdSense and Amazon.com’s Associates program, using photo blogging services, adding a site counter so that you can track your readership, using Blogger Mobile for mobile blogging, and how to archive your blog. For those of you who have your own Web hosting, you will learn how to publish your blog to your own server."

We just heard from the Ozzie developers at bluepulse that they've whipped up a Blogger widget for their mobile phone platform; here are a few details from their post about it:

• Supports HTML, so you can link to a site, another post, or another blog from your post
• Supports multiple Blogger blogs.
  
• Create a new post, or edit an existing post from the widget and republish it
• Save a post as a draft and then edit and publish it from the widget or your desktop later

Check it out!

Chelsea Peretti is funny lady who likes pictures of cheese (judging by her blog, anyway). I also recommend her latest video, Roadtrip.

Did you see the Netherlands/Portugal game on Sunday? Wow, not exactly Joga Bonito with a record number of cards given out in a World Cup game. If you missed it, don't worry, the blogosphere has lit up with World Cup fever. Traditional media moguls like the BBC Sport and The New York Times have their reporters commenting in blog form, not to mention the flood of colorful photo collages like World Cup Blog. What will happen to these blogs when the tournament is over? I guess we'll see.

Great article in Wired News about how homeless folks can use blogging to reach out and express themselves online. I never thought about how important it would be to get homeless people email access, but it makes obvious sense when you realize that they have no fixed address.

Check out this post by CJ, who's already integrated Google's AJAX Search API into his Blogger blog:

"A little HTML, a little CSS, and a little Javascript should do the trick. In my HTML, I used two divs, and a link to clear the results. One div is the search control div, and the other is a wrapper for the search control div. I put it near the bottom of my html files so it appears on top of the content on each page. Here's how it looks:"

    <div id="searchControlWrapper">
 <a href="#" id="clearLink"
    >Clear</a>
 <div id="searchControl"/>
</div>

You can play with it by searching for keywords like java and ajax in the searchbox in his blog's upper-right corner.

There should be more fictional blogging. As a guide I suggest you check out Jean-Luc Picard's blog:

A vital part of engineering has broken down on the Enterprise.

It's the laundry machine.

Maybe we should implement a stardate option for date headers ...

Just wanted to point to David Weiss's outstanding blog; David works on Mac apps at Microsoft, and posts about fascinating (uh, to me at least) behind-the-scenes stuff:

• A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab (where they do automated QA testing)
• Mac Lab Questions and Answers (from commenters on the above post)
• Questions about UI Design (regarding Office for Mac)
• Glossy MacBook (on the just-announced MacBook)
  

See Ethan Zuckerman's blog and Anarchogeek for details.

Back in March, the Google Research blog posted details about our sponsorship of this year's FIRST - "For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" - tournament:

"Google jumped at the opportunity to sponsor this organization after Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway and the first implantable dialysis pump) spoke to a packed Google audience about his lifelong crusade to improve education in the United States. Dean founded US FIRST over 15 years ago, and from humble beginnings in the Northeast, FIRST has now grown to involve over 60,000 high school students all over the United States and the world."

Blogger's been able to play a small but significant role in helping the teams share their experiences and accomplishments with the world, in the form of team photoblogs. Here are a few that are loaded with great photos and posts:

• RoboRaiders
• WilsonMagnet
• Royal Assault
• The Cat Attack
• The Midnight Mechanics
• Team Driven

The BBC posted an interesting article about Wandering Scribe, a Blogger user in London who's currently homeless yet managing to reach an international audience with her writings. According to her blog, it's sounding like things are looking up:

Not out of the woods yet

But getting closer...

There have been meetings and it looks like there might be a publishing deal. Nothing is settled...and don't know what else to say for now, feel everything, and sometimes nothing, just walking around in a daze...my fingernails bitten down to the quick.

Related Buzz post: Homeless in Greensboro

Google Sitemaps is now a whole lot easier to use for bloggers:

"Some of you aren't able to use our existing verification method, so we asked for your feedback on an alternate method of verification that uses a meta tag on the root page of your site. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so we've added this method as an option."

"To verify ownership of your site using this method, simply click the Verify link for your site, choose Add a META tag as the verification option, and then copy the tag provided to the <head> section of your home page. Once you've done that, select the checkbox and click Verify."

To use this new verification method in Blogger, simply edit your Template and republish your blog.

Update: A Consuming Experience has posted expanded instructions and info about this.

We're doing some user studies about how folks work with photos online. To participate you must:

• live in West Los Angeles, Santa Monica or the surrounding area
• post photos online

We are looking for all levels of users to take part in this study and will pay up $150 for your participation.

If interested, please email blog.study.la@gmail.com to learn more.

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.

I just came across the Los Angeles Fire Department's blog via Caterina's post on the Flickr blog. They're posting daily about all sorts of things, from bubonic plague facts to swimming pool safety to an Easter Egg hunt at Dodger Stadium, and even a spring/summer event schedule. Aside from the the amazing pictures they're posting at Flickr and Filmloop, they're also using Google Translate to make their blog available in eight languages besides English.

Nice work, LAFD!

Dr. Razavi, our on-site Doctor here at work, recently started blogging about things medical. Here are some recent posts of note:

• Ergonomics: Obeying the Natural Laws of Work to Avoid Injury
• Whooping Cough: Why Worry?
• Altitude Sickness: How High is Too High?
• Lifestyle Changes Do Make a Difference
  
• Travel Recommendations for China
• Travel Recommendations for India

She's posted to the main Google Blog a few times too:

• Attention, Frequent Flyers
• Bird Flu Basics
• Stress: the Holiday Grinch
• A Resolution for Well-being

Check out the Blogswana project! Background here:

"The one-year pilot project will work with a group of about 20 college students from one of the major universities, and provide them with blogging and journalism expertise and guidance. They would commit to a year of “blogging for others.” Each student participant would start their own blog, as well as a blog for their “partner” (the person for whom they will blog). Each partner would be someone who has been effected in some way by the AIDS virus."

[via Ev]

The NYT has a good article about senior citizen bloggers that includes interviews with Blogger users Mort Reichek and Milt Rebmann.

Quoth the Times:

As others have noted, we've made good progress in the past six months in reducing the amount of spam on Blog*Spot. One of the tools we're using is an automatic spam classifier. The risk in using a classifier is that we will mistakenly identify good content as spam. This percentage of false positives is both very low and one that we are reducing by further improving our systems.

Because no spam fighting measure is more important to us than protecting the content of our users, we've implemented a number of safeguards to make sure that any mistakes made by the classifier can be corrected. This involves presenting CAPTCHAs or other warnings to the user with instructions on how to contact support to resolve the issue. Our support team usually fixes these problems within one business day.

For certain types of blogs - a fraction of those classified - if we receive no response from the user after a significant period of time, we will mark the site for removal. Even when a blog is in this state, the actual content can still be retrieved and the blog restored for a period of several weeks. We've also put additional warnings in the Dashboard for blogs in this state so that the problem can be corrected quickly.

The steps we've taken have both improved the quality of content on Blog*Spot and improved the Blogger service as a whole. By taking steps like this, we're able to dedicate more storage, bandwidth and engineering resources to our users instead of spammers.

PC World has some kind things to say about Blogger, in its 101 Fabulous Freebies feature:

"Our favorite service is Blogger. The first major free blogging tool (launched in 1999), Blogger stays ahead of the game by remaining incredibly convenient to use and by offering a rich complement of features. If you have a Web server, you can use Blogger to publish your Weblog via FTP. But we like the easy way: hosting the blog on Blogspot. In about 5 minutes, we were able to create a blog, pick an appealing design, and start posting. Uploading images is a simple process, and the service supplies a generous 300MB of photo storage."

"Blogger is especially friendly to mobile bloggers. Can't get access to a computer easily? Send a picture or a text message from your phone to a special SMS address, and up it goes. Blogger's Audioblogger service even offers voice blogging: Just call a special number, enter a code, and say your piece. Blogger converts the sound of your voice (up to 5 minutes' worth) into an audio file and posts it for all to hear."

A few of our siblings here at Google also got some love:

• Google Desktop in Find It: Online search and reference services
• Picasa in Kick Back
• Gmail in The New Faces of Web-Based E-Mail

Be sure to check out the New York Times redesign that just launched. Anil talks a bit about it at the SixApart blog, and Khoi discusses it on his site. The part I'm most excited about is the Most Popular box in the right column — next to most emailed is... most blogged!

"We also wanted to give our readers a greater voice and sprinkle a little more serendipity around the site by providing prominent links to a list of most e-mailed and blogged articles, most searched for information and popular movies."

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 was,

[j]ust a simple, ongoing, irregularly updated list of blogs I've happened to come across and found interesting for one reason or another. This reason need not be substantial. It could be I liked a particular post. It could be the blog seems to have good writing, or good design, or original content or concept, or I just like the name.

Blogs of Note enjoyed a cheerful run on the homepage, showing off the ten most recently noted blogs. Ev chose most of them, with other contributions coming from Jason, Maggie, Olivier, and Anil. Eventually Pyra got bought, and Blogs of Note stayed, with new contributors and an ever-growing pool of awesome Blogger-powered blogs to showcase.

Then, in what was otherwise a grand day for Blogger, the informative and helpful new homepage design kicked Blogs of Note off the home page and onto the Dashboard. Though it still showed off darn nifty blogs (including this one), Blogs of Note sniffled a bit and cried itself to sleep at nights. Why wasn’t it getting the homepage love it deserved?

Blogs of Note gamely noted on. It waited for its moment, which finally came when an attempt to put a Blog Search box on the Blogger homepage went awry and ended up as Explore Blogs, an overly delightfully-animated look into the most interesting, most recent, and most random blogs on Blogger (plus a search box). Finally, Blogs of Note was given back its spotlight and — so as not to look stale and lame — we kicked it up a notch and started updating it more often, showing off a new noteworthy blog every day.
In the past five years, over seven hundred blogs have appeared on Blogs of Note (at least one of them twice!), yet all anyone has ever seen is the most recent ten. What’s up with that?

Today we’re happy to unveil something new: the Blogs of Note blog (meta!). Now you can see all the blogs we’ve ever blog of noted, going all the way back to 2001. This also means that if you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the Blogs of Note Atom feed to get the latest delivered to you every day.

We hope you have fun with this combination slice of blogging history/firehose of hot fresh blogs. As a bonus tip, if you run across a blog that you’d like to check out but that’s not there any more, try running it through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to see if they have a copy.

Channel 4 in UK has launched a site called 121 for fostering dialogue between paired sets of folks, one in the UK and one in another country.

It's like a public penpal session written in blog format. For example, their first blog is written by Steve - a bloke from Coventry - and Mr. Behi who lives in Tehran.

Nice lookin' template there, gents!

Last Friday, Inside Google posted about a Blog*Spot user who had allegedly received an email from Blogger that stated the MSN Search box on his blog constituted a violation of Blogger's Terms of Service. I'd like to clarify a couple of points about this claim:

1. You have always been able to run non-Google services on your blog. In the same way you can use Yahoo's Flickr to post photos to your blog, you can include an MSN Search box in your template. We consider it a violation of the terms to modify the Blogger navbar, but that's not what was reported to have happened here.


2. We did not send a request to have the MSN Search box removed. We reviewed the information that's been made available, and we found no such request from our support teams.


3. We did not delete nor remove the blog in question from Blog*Spot.

Our content policies enable the widest range of expression possible. And we're proud that Blogger users can customize their blogs in the manner that suits them best ... even if that means using another search tool.

Last week at SxSW I met Michael Verdi, who pointed me toward Freevlog, "a step-by-step guide to setting up a videoblog for free."

Definitely check it out if you're interested in adding video to your blog — it features Blogger as well as the Internet Archive, OurMedia, and FeedBurner. Of course, you should also check out Google Video!

More about Freevlog: http://freevlog.org/

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