Blogger/Blogspot is a free blog hosting platform provided by Google. It is an amazingly fast, blog hosting service that is great for people who want to start a blog for free. Originally developed by Pyra Labs, this service was acquired by Google way back in 2003. Since then, this blogging platform has seen a tremendous growth.
Always Free
When you sign up for blogger, you get to start blog(s) which are registered for free. You do not have to pay a single cent to get the services provided by Blogger. With one Google account, you get to start as many as 100 blogs. But you normally start off with one blog. You get a free blogger URL like http://myblog.blogspot.com. You get a sub-domain for free that acts as a part of the blogspot.com main domain. You can give your blog any web address within the blogger sub-domains as long as it is not taken.
Besides getting free sub domains, you can also use top-level domain names like .com and .net. When you set up a top level domain, your previous sub-domain account will work as well. There is no compulsion that you have to buy the domain name from the Blogger domain registration service. Your domain name can be purchased from any domain name registrar. Then, DNS techniques are used to point your top-level domain to your Blogger blog.
Customization and Settings
After starting a blog, you can use the different features that are provided by this service to customize your blog as per your liking. Some examples of settings are:
- Number of posts that you want to display in a single page.
- Description of your blog and profile.
- Edit the privacy of your blog to make it visible to search engines and other users.
- Modify how comments are displayed and moderated. You can also configure who can comment in your blog and how.
- You can also turn on and off commenting for individual posts.
- You can choose your post URL and provide geographic tagging as well.
- Besides posts, you can also create pages like about us page or terms of service page.
- You can also set up how things such as time formatting, languages and translations, etc are handled by your blog.
- Other settings include being able to configure blog feeds, and importing/exporting your blogger blog data.
Templates and Styling
You can customize your blog up to great details. You can polish your blog to look and act like you want. You will be able to use the various templates available for Blogger, which are provided by the site itself or by thousands of third-party websites providing blogger template are out there. You can also create your own template if you want. You will be able to change minute details such as colors, CSS styles, widths, heights, images etc with the help of one single XML file. Details can be changed by advanced as well as normal users. Advanced users can use advanced configuration and editing options while other users can use the basic layout editing options. You can also specify a different style to work in mobile devices.
Posting and Limitations
Besides styling and customizing your blog, with Blogspot you can post as much as you like. There is no limit to how many blog posts that you can make. As long as you are not spamming, you have the right to post as many posts as you want. There are also no or hardly any limitations on commenting, post length, etc. You will never have to worry about running out of space and/or bandwidth with blogger. You get as much as you can use without paying for anything.
But it needs to be noted that there are a certain number of limitations like the number of authors, space consumed by high quality images, blog labels, etc. But these limitations have been set to really high and they hardly count as limitations for normal bloggers. Only bloggers who are trying to upload a large number of high quality images will face issues such as running out of disk space. Otherwise, one will never come across such problems.
Earning Opportunities
When you start blogging with Blogger (or any other blog for that matter), you will get different opportunities to make some money. You will be able to put advertisements in your blog that will generate revenue for you. With Blogger, it is easier to setup those advertisements. There is a high level of integration with AdSense, another great Google service which allows you to make money by displaying related ads on web sites. You can easily apply for and display ads of different sizes at different locations with the help of tools available at Blogger. You can also display other third party advertisements if you want.
Other Google Service Integration
When you create a Google account and begin blogging at Blogger, you will also receive several other benefits that are available to you. For example your Google account can be used to create Google Plus profile or pages. There you will be able to share your blog posts with your visitors. You can also integrate your blog with other services such as Adsense (mentioned before). You can upload videos to YouTube using the same account while sharing it in your blog. The level of integration between different Google services is really high and you get to take advantages of all that.
Servers
Blogger blogs are also hosted at blazing fast servers. Your blog will have no known downtime. It will be served quickly from very reliable data centers created specifically for this purpose.
Final Words
Overall, Blogger or BlogSpot is a really great service with some neat features that are considered high quality in the industry. There are some limitations as well. But the benefits are really huge when compared. A normal or a first time blogger will find it really easy to start blogging by using this service. Best of it all, everything is provided for free. Hence, Blogger is an excellent service.
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