Google's Blogger hit by publishing bug

IDG News Service — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:27:53 -0400

Google's Blogger has been hit by a bug affecting several of the blog-publishing service's features, including editing, autosave, posting and time stamping.

Publishers have posted many complaints in the official Blogger discussion forum since early Thursday morning, and a Google official finally acknowledged that there is a problem early Friday afternoon.

"Thanks for all the feedback and follow-up answers you have posted on this issue. We are working on this problem right now and hope to have it all sorted out soon," a Google official named Gatsby wrote Friday at around 1:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on the forum.

Blogger, a hosting and publishing service that pioneered the blogging craze, is often dogged by bugs and performance problems. Despite a push in the past year by Google to revamp its feature set, Blogger is generally considered to trail other providers of free blog publishing like Wordpress.com and Six Apart's TypePad.

Although it is used by millions worldwide, Blogger this week acquired arguably its most important publisher, the one that it can't afford to disappoint: Google cofounder Sergey Brin on Thursday started publishing his personal blog on Blogger. No word on whether Brin is among the undisclosed number of Blogger publishers affected by the latest, and as yet unfixed, bug.

Last month, another bug caused Blogger to return error messages instead of blog home pages. Days earlier, Google mistakenly flagged a number of legitimate sites as spam blogs, prompting the company to scramble to unlock them.

Earlier this year, Internet consumer advocacy group StopBadware.org identified Blogger as a popular target for scammers and malicious hackers, who use the blog-publishing service to set up blogs to distribute malware. According to the group, this made Google the owner of the fifth-largest malware-infected network in the world in May.

In June, a Blogger bug affected publishers who post to their blogs via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

Google didn't respond to a request for comment.

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Google's Blogger hit by publishing bug