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 subdomains of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via ftp. All such blogs had to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via Custom URL.
As part of the Blogger redesign in 2006, all blogs associated with a user's Google Account were migrated to Google servers. Blogger claims that the service is now more reliable because of the quality of the servers. Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a drag-and-drop template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new Web feed options.
Furthermore, blogs are updated dynamically, as opposed to rewriting HTML files. In a version of the service called Blogger in Draft, new features are tested before being released to all users. New features are discussed in the service's official blog. In September 2009, Google introduced new features into Blogger as part of its tenth anniversary celebration. The features included a new interface for post editing, improved image handling, Raw HTML Conversion, and other Google Docs-based implementations, including:
Adding location to posts via geotagging. Post time-stamping at publication, not at original creation.Vertical re-sizing of the post editor. The size is saved in a per-user, per-blog preference.Link editing in Compose mode.
