Google Inc.'s Blogger team this week solved a technical problem with the blog publishing and hosting service and introduced a new feature that gives publishers the ability to upload videos to their sites.
An undetermined number of Blogger publishers had trouble performing various editing and posting operations on Monday and Tuesday, but by Wednesday the problem had been solved.
One of the people affected was Lisa Kasanicky, owner and chief editor of Arizona Spa Girls Inc., which publishes the ArizonaSpaGirls Web site, a directory of spas and beauty salons in the state.
Arizona Spa Girls organizes a series of summer events in the state and publishes another Web site called SummerSpaAZ to offer information about these activities.
Although both of those sites are hosted internally, Kasanicky chose Blogger to launch a companion blog for SummerSpaAZ in May.
With the summer events wrapping up this past weekend, there was much expectation among attendees and readers to see the latest reports and photos early this week on the blog.
But when Kasanicky tried to post to the blog Tuesday morning, she got an increasing number of server code errors. "It got worse and worse. At first I couldn't publish anything, and then I couldn't access the blog at all," she said on Thursday.
Although Kasanicky doesn't plan to use Blogger for additional work-related blogs any time soon, she hopes Google will continue to enhance it to the point where Blogger might provide professional-grade uptime.
"I'm not giving up on Blogger. It's a Google product, and I'm a big fan of what they do. I know they perfect things," she said. "I'd use it again for keeping in touch with family, something that's more recreational as opposed to something professional, until it gets to a point when it's a reliable product."
On Wednesday, Blogger and its Blogspot hosting platform also suffered an outage that lasted little over an hour and affected the entire system.
After marking the eighth 'birthday' of this free blogging service on Thursday, Google announced the video upload feature on Friday.
"This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading," reads the announcement in the official Blogger Buzz Web site.
Publishers will see a new button in the Blogger editing console to upload videos stored in their computers. More information and a how-to video can be found on this page.
"Google Patches Blogger, Adds Video Support" Comments