Has Google Blogger Publishing Tool Been Upgraded?

During the last few weeks, Blogger's publishing tool seems to have been upgraded.

After months of intermittent outages and long delays in publishing (and even a few outages), Blogger appears to have received an upgrade.

The problems started last summer when there were a number of hacks and outages of the Blooger publishing tool.

Blogger is publishing faster than even a couple of months ago, and the company has added a number of new features and services to Blogger, including dynamic tools for formatting a web page or blog and the ability to publish to your own domain.

Not a bad deal for anyone that wants an email account (although Gmail is currently closed to new members), blogger account, word processor and spreadsheet software tools, promotion and advertising services, calendar, email news alerts, maps, photo hosting, webmaster tools, and more.

A search of the Blooger blog did not unearth any news of the upgrade to the functionality of the publishing tool. (We just had an earthquake here in Los Gatos, CA in the Bay Area, it was fairly strong. The epicenter was Lafayette, CA, about 25 miles from here; my place shook and the windows and wood creaked and rattled and then it slowed down to a rolling affect. That was one of the strongest I've felt in 12 years of living here. It's the third in a week and people here are getting nervous. Google is also about 25 miles away from here and they felt it too. Anyways...)

But such tremendous growth and demand from computer users worldwide for access to Google's vast array of products and services will have its challenges.

One thing that would be great is if Google added to Blogger the auto-save feature used with Gmail.

In Blogger, you need to remember to Save As Draft (before you want to finally Publish), but with Gmail it runs a script to auto-save whatever email you are drafting just in case of a technical glitch, or more likely, a crash using Windows Explorer.

For now, just get in the habit of repeatedly clicking the Save As Draft button until you are ready to publish.

I'd love to hear from someone at Google about an auto-save feature for Blogger. From what I know of my work in the profession, it shouldn't be that difficult to apply the auto-save functionality for Blogger. Perhaps there it is just not on the engineering team's long, long list of priorities. Google hires something like 10 or 15 new engineers a week!

Some helpful Blogger resources:

Blogger Status page

Known Issues page

Blogger's newest features

Extraneous link: Tonight's official USGS eartquake report