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Overview
Blogger is a site offering remotely hosted software for producing online articles
in various formats. Whether you call it an online journal, web log, "blog" or news
publication, the underlying structure is basically the same.
As an added bonus, Blogger articles can also be sent to almost any existing web site with FTP
access, allowing them to be more closely integrated with other content.
Details
A basic Blogger account is free, allowing you to use a reduced range of features if you wish to
test the service for a while or have no need for additional conveniences.
Blogger provides a way to automate (and accelerate) the article publishing process without
the need to write HTML or worry about installing Perl or PHP scripts. However, it still
allows you to control the look and location of your entries.
Instead of coding your articles manually and then uploading the newest version of your page, you
can create new posts by submitting a simple form on the Blogger web site, with the results shown
almost immediately on your site, with your design.
Even the free service can be customised using a wide range of ready made templates and those
familiar with HTML can create their own. The resulting pages can be published on the Blogger
servers, or sent to an external host via FTP.
A number of settings are available to control how many entries are shown on the "front" page,
how often they are archived and whether your site is listed in the Blogger directory.
The articles themselves can either be written in HTML or plain text, allowing you to choose the
format you are most comfortable with.
It is also possible to allow others to add articles to your own if you have several writers in a
team. These people also need to have or sign up for an account with Blogger, so it is not
really practical to allow visitors to comment on your entries.
Summary
Blogger is a very useful service for webmasters who wish to add news or other short articles to
their site with the minimum of fuss.
The fact that the pages are static HTML and can easily be published to the planet servers gives
it a big advantage over similar Perl and PHP programs which must be run on the CGI-BIN server.
The finished pages will be quicker to load, and less liable to suffer from server downtime.
Well worth a closer look.
Further Information
You can find out more at the Blogger site.
If you decide to use this service, I also have instructions explaining how to create and setup a Blogger web log.
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