Tuesday, May 01, 2012
One interesting question, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, seems to focus not on what can be done - but on what can't.
What are the limits, that apply to my Blogger blog?Some people are accustomed to dealing with resource limits, imposed on websites hosted by paid hosting services, which meter service based on bandwidth and storage space used by a blog or website.
Blogger / Google does not spend time monitoring our blogs, and what resources we use. Neither bandwidth or storage size are limited. However, there are some limits on the content, which may restrict growth of our blogs. If we're aware of these limits, we can work around them.
There are no real limits on resources, used by our blogs. There are limits on how we use our blogs, though.
Auto Pagination is a network resources limiting feature which dynamically decides how much of our blogs can be made visible to our readers, at one time. Use of the new, dynamic templates can avoid limits imposed by auto pagination.
Picasa, the Google photo hosting service, does have a limit on storage space. You can pay a small fee for additional storage space - or you can use any of various third party photo hosting services.
It's not technically possible to charge our readers for access or use of Blogger services - and Blogger / Google has, at least in the past, specifically forbidden us to charge for use of their services. We are explicitly forbidden against using a Blogger blog to make money using adult content.
Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content. For example, don't create blogs where a significant percentage of the content is ads or links to commercial porn sites.
Besides the real effects of auto pagination, and photo storage limits, there are a few well defined limits and requirements, which affect Blogger blog content and usage.
- Age. Blogger account holders (and thus, blog owners) must be a minimum of 13 years of age.
You must be at least thirteen (13) years of age to use the Service.
This limit will not prevent blogs being maintained by those underage. Some parents are known to setup blogs, for their underage children to publish - that is currently left as their decision, and not rigidly enforced. However, the Blogger account setup, and "Create a blog", wizards, both provide some notice about the official minimum age. - Blog Content. Each blog page - single post, archive page, or main page - can have a maximum of 1MB of blog content. If you care about your readers at all, this limit will be pretty hard to reach. Use common sense about the content of the blog. Auto Pagination automatically limits the number of posts that will display, on one physical page.
- Blog Following Count. You can Follow a maximum of 300 blogs, under one Blogger account.
- Blog Membership Count. A public blog can have up to 100 members - including administrators and authors.
- Blog Ownership Count. You can setup a maximum of 100 blogs, under a single Blogger account. I passed this limit a while ago, so I have to rename various test blogs, when I setup a new test.
- Image (Photos / Pictures) Storage. All images / photos / pictures, uploaded using the "Insert image" button in Blogger post editor, are hosted by Picasa. See Picasa Help: Free storage limits for details on their limits. See Picasa Accounts: Picasa Web Albums Storage Usage, at any time, to check current use, under your Google account.
- Labels. Each blog post can have a total of 200 characters of labels, including " " and ",". Each post can have a maximum of 20 labels, and each blog can have a maximum of 5,000 labels.
- Posts. There is no limit on the number of posts in a blog. If you use labels, you will probably run into a label limit, as you add posts, when the blog becomes exceedingly large.
- Private Blog Membership. A private blog can have up to 100 members - including administrators, authors, and designated readers (aka "Guests"). This number is not always available to all blogs. If you need to distribute content to more than 99 carefully chosen friends, you can use Google+ and one or more limited membership Circles.
- Static Pages (aka "Pages"). You may have up to 20 static pages in any blog. You can index any number of "Pages" as "Web address" entries, and link to label searches, individual posts, and other blogs and websites, however.
- Video Size. Using Blogger post editor, you may upload videos no larger than 100MB.
For additional and up to date advice, you may want to periodically reference Blogger Content Policy, and Google Terms of Service.
