Premium services coming for Blogger.com

Premium services coming for Blogger.com ::: This isn’t necessarily big news for most readers, but as a recent convert to the world of “blogger”, I’m at least happy about this. Some background:

What you’re reading is a self-published “weblog”. There’s no real magic behind the scenes, though anyone who has tried to maintain a web site with frequently-changing content knows that the challenge is often finding easy ways of publishing the content, consistently formatting the content, etc. Blogger.com simplifies the process by allowing users to easily create content and maintain templates for the presentation. Everything is updated through a browser (I’m composing this post through a browser), and the web-based service at blogger.com then updates the information via ftp to my server at rklau.com. Pretty slick.

Blogger.com is currently run by one guy – Evan Williams, and it supports more than 300,000 users like me who use the site to post content to their weblogs. Remarkably, the site is free (as is its companion hosting site, Blogspot.com). According to this post, Ev is going to be introducing a “ premium” services suite for blogger.com users. I’ll pay. Why? Servers have been sluggish lately, a security breach on 12/25 left the service down for 24 hours, and new features have been slow in coming. Due to recent troubles with server performance, I’ve been unable to successfully post and publish any content since Wednesday. (And I’m on my sixth attempt at posting this post…)