Blogging

Blogger Buzz: As you may have heard, things are starting to look a little different across many Google products—and today, Blogger is the next product to get a makeover. It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time. ...

Mashable: Tumblr has returned to the web after a full day’s, err, vacation. The popular blogging/reblogging platform went down yesterday afternoon during some planned maintenance; the exact reasons for the outage are unknown, but Tumblr has mentioned database cluster issues. Rumors aside, the downtime had nothing whatsoever to do with a 4chan-led DDoS attack. The official company blog states a fact of life for any successful startup: Keeping up with at-scale traffic on a startup’s budget and infrastructure is hard, hard work, “more work than our small team was prepared for,” the blog reads. ...

Brian Casel is a web designer and owner of ThemeJam WordPress Themes and CasJam Media. You can follow Brian on his blog at briancasel.com or on Twitter @CasJam. WordPress has long been known as a dedicated blogging platform, giving users the tools they need to publish their message and interact with readers. However, with the official release of version 3.0, set to drop this month, the platform will be much closer, if not well within the territory of a content management system (CMS). ...