How has Blogger changed your life?
This post marks the end of a personal era. Over the last three and a bit years I have religiously written something into Blogger almost each and every day. From late 1999, when I'd been in London less than a year, to getting my job at Time Out, to my disasterous relationships, through my period of limited work, right around to my stuff with EMAP, the BBC and UpMyStreet - Blogger has been with me. It's been to conferences with me, it's been to Los Angeles with me (twice) and New York with me (once). It's seen me make any number of dumb personal websites, been with me when I watched the Twin Towers collapse. It's sat beside me as I witnessed global news events and dumb websites involving kittens. Blogger has helped me make any number of great new friends (so many in fact that I'm bound to leave some out accidentally).
Today I say goodbye to Blogger and Blogger Pro. I've finally come to a decision. I've finally made the leap to Movable Type. It's a strange sensation - knowing that I won't be seeing that comforting black, blue and red site each and every day. My reasons are probably clear to most people so I won't go into them - I couldn't be critical of the service if I tried. It's done so much for me - and for remarkably little in return. So instead, to say goodbye, I'm going to use one of the new features available to me and ask you all to raise your glasses and answer the question: How has Blogger changed your life?
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
I would have to say that Blogger has given me a chance to feel like I'm doing more to improve life in America. I've always been politically active in the sense that I would write to different political figures. Blogger has offered me the opportunity to encourage others to do the same.
→ Posted by: David at January 28, 2003 11:11 PM
Tom - why do only a few of your postings have a comment facility -- or am I missing something really obvious?
→ Posted by: Charlie B at January 28, 2003 11:43 PM
It got me going. It helped me find a voice. And then, once I'd found it, I ran like hell from the sandpit and went to MT. (Er, and the fact I've singularly failed to say anything deep or profound *since* I changed to MT is neither here nor there).
→ Posted by: Tom Dolan at January 29, 2003 12:03 AM
Blogger sucked me in with the pretty colours, starting out as something to pass the time at a very very dull job and ending up making me remember what a kick you can get out of writing.
Tom, importing your archives must have been fun... so many years of posts to give bloody titles to! Heh :)
→ Posted by: shauna at January 29, 2003 12:20 AM
I'm not planning to put the comments onto all my posts. I feel weird enough letting people comment on my work-related stuff, let alone the stuff where I drone on about my flat being a mess or my hair needing a cut. And yes - importing everything into the site was far from entertaining...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at January 29, 2003 12:41 AM
When I first used Blogger it scared me but I soon got the hang of it. It was probably the first web-ap (other than email) I really used on a daily basis for my own site creation. Without it I wouldn't have built up two sites and a significant audience for both. It also started my learning curve - I would never have started using MT without it. While I don't use it now I'm ever so grateful.
→ Posted by: Pete at January 29, 2003 12:44 AM
I used to do everything by hand, which made archiving a huge pain. Blogger takes care of that for me, leaving me more time to... er... sit in front of a computer and not update my archives by hand.
→ Posted by: rebecca at January 29, 2003 1:09 AM
I had a vague idea about doing regular updates on my website. I'd never even heard the word "blog." Finding and delving into Blogger was like a Christmas morning that lasted three weeks.
→ Posted by: Chris at January 29, 2003 4:29 AM
I never had the discipline to sit down, pen to paper, and write out my thoughts.
Blogger made doing that easy. It has also brought new jobs, celebrity interviews, and several real-life journalist jobs.
It has also consumed way too much of my time. But who is counting?
→ Posted by: yb at January 29, 2003 5:23 AM
Like yb I have tried and failed to keep a diary countless times but Blogger made it easy and fun to jot down my thoughts. It gave me a way of having a voice and a way of chucking my ideas out into the world. I started up just before 9.11 and it felt particularly important at the time to try to make the world a better place. Also like yb the networking aspect of blogging has been amazing and resulted in me getting to know and meet the guys who wrote Cluetrain within months of starting.
→ Posted by: Euan at January 29, 2003 7:35 AM
Because of Blogger... and barbelith... I kissed a sweet, neurotic British boy on a Sunset Blvd.
→ Posted by: Ralph at January 29, 2003 8:39 AM
Because Blogger allowed me to produce a website when I knew less than a handful of HTML tags; because it appeared to me - and still does - to be resolutely non-geeky (Moveable Type is great, but it's geeky); because it allowed me to find a place to put my words each day; because when I started using it there was a little sense of a Blogger "community"; so many reasons, really.
Like you, when I switched from Blogger to MT, it did seem rather like the end of an era.
→ Posted by: Vaughan at January 29, 2003 10:21 AM
When I started using Blogger a couple of years ago, I knew two or three html tags; now, having learnt the rudiments of web design by endlessly tweaking my blog template, people are actually giving me actual money in return for making websites (I still have difficulty believing this). So, yeah, Blogger has changed my life a fair bit, in that it gave me a new hobby to obsess over which has now turned into a tiny corner of my career. That said, I just switched to Moveable Type too...
→ Posted by: Jack at January 29, 2003 11:25 AM
When I found out about blogger I was a young soldier with a passion for writing, until then, all of my writing was done on my grey notebook which I always carried. When I found out about blogger, I started publishing to the web, then, being a native Hebrew speaker (and writer) I managed to make blogger work in hebrew and started one of the first Israeli weblogs. Blogger helped me become a better, more popular writer, it's simple yet genius interface has contributed more than any other website or software to developing the creative, personal & warm side of the world wide web. Thank you, blogger.
→ Posted by: Ohad at January 29, 2003 12:08 PM
Blogger changed my life because, even though I've hardly ever used it, it's given me a whole bunch of people to point to and laugh at.
→ Posted by: Graham at January 29, 2003 12:22 PM
(Although I don't use blogger) weblogging has changed my life because before it, my life was full of meaningful and complex crap.
Now I get the opportunity to enrich my living experience with a load of useless tat many times a day. It helps to keep me from thinking too much.
→ Posted by: Wild at January 29, 2003 1:18 PM
Blogger is an important stop-release for me. It allows me to rant on about unimportant topics or random thoughts in the deluded belief that people 'out there' might find them interesting. It means that people who interact with me on a daily, real-life basis don't get bombarded with this, but that I have an oulet all the same. I also feel on the periphery of a community, but what's new there?
→ Posted by: Lubin Odana at January 29, 2003 2:01 PM
I say things on my weblog that I would NEVER say in real life. Blogger is an alternative universe for me, where I am allowed to be myself without fear.
→ Posted by: Emma at January 29, 2003 7:47 PM
Well goodness, where to start? It distracted the company I co-founded from what we were initially trying to build -- a project management application -- and sent us all on a crazy journey that continues to this day. Seeing people use it, love it, and berate it, makes me happy, sad, and proud all at once. If it hadn't been for Blogger I wouldn't have worked with the brightest people I've ever worked with, I wouldn't have met my boyfriend, I wouldn't have met more than a hundred other people I've met through my site and weblogging. It still breaks my heart that I'm not part of it sometimes, but I'm glad to see it continue. And more than anything, I'm happy people have found so much value in it.
PS. Tom, you should change the preview template for comments, it's coming up as the default and not in your site design.
→ Posted by: megnut at January 29, 2003 9:44 PM
Ah. Right. So what you're saying is that my switch to Movable Type is a bit of a clunky fudge that seems slightly underprepared for? You'd not be wrong - there seems to be a bug with either Blogger or Chimera that means if you edit the template it completely empties all the tags of all the useful information they contain. When you publish - boom - your site is all crappy-lookin'... Guess who did that the other day and decided to push through his half-assed plan without check it all through properly... D'oh.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at January 29, 2003 11:13 PM
I'm not sure if Blogger has changed my life, apart from the people I've met through the act of blogging. But I've always done my growing up in public. Writing awful poetry in the schoolpaper, working for fanzines, connecting with people world wide through music fan dom, writing with 30+ pen pals. I was always part of some underground community. These days the numbers are bigger, the audience wider. But it's not been a personal change for me.
(Can I just say that I want to take the plasticbag.org design to my bedroom and worship it on my knees? It takes Jason's idea and exploits it to the max. Love it.)
→ Posted by: Caroline at January 30, 2003 9:15 AM
Oh go on then... You can say it if you have to... You brought flowers too? Oh, how sweet! But really, you shouldn't have!
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at January 30, 2003 9:35 AM
Blogger now = food. When I'm hungry, I experience an almost subconcious sensation that drives me to the refrigerator, or causes me to pipe up and ask "Hey, when's lunch?" In much the same way, Blogger has engendered and consequently is satisfying a similar need. When I am panged with the urge to write, I now almost unknowingly think: 'I should jot this down for the blog later' or 'Wouldn't that make a great entry.' To not write later is to starve. Like some of my other appetites, my lust for Blogger has become insatiable.
→ Posted by: Bryan Behrenshausen at January 30, 2003 1:18 PM
Although I made the switch to Movable Type myself about nine months ago, Blogger is where I started. It gave me a method and an opportunity to write every day with the knowledge that there'd be an audience (however small). My writing has improved thanks to this whole weblog thing, and that's great.
→ Posted by: Andrew at January 30, 2003 8:05 PM
I started out with PHPnuke, then thankfully, after too many headaches and dreaming in PHP code I switched over to Blogger. It was refreshing to see content handled so easily. To be able to tweak a date or a font color for everything with just a few clicks. I moved onto Movable Type as well but Blogger was a great place to start.
→ Posted by: Seth Werkheiser at January 30, 2003 8:56 PM
I wonder how many people signed up to blogger because of it's funky logo and main site? Call me shallow, but (at least) half the reason I bothered was because the site design was so lovely back at the end of 1999/beginning of 2000/whenever I first discovered blogger.
→ Posted by: James at January 31, 2003 2:47 AM
To paraphrase Lewis Black: Blogger™ is the best — and worst — thing about democracy. It's the best because anybody can post anything to the web. It's the worst because anybody can post anything to the web.
→ Posted by: steef at January 31, 2003 1:52 PM
It may seem a little over the top to put it like this, but I didn't really think the internet was personal at all until Blogger showed up. In fact, I didn't really think there were *any* normal people on the internet until Blogger.
→ Posted by: pat at January 31, 2003 6:04 PM
I forget where I heard about Blogger, but being the curious type (and intrigued by the whole blogging scene), I checked it out about a year ago. It didn't take much to convince me to sign up, but unfortunately and for no apparent reason, I could never get the damn thing to work. As a result of my frustration, I spent months searching and testing all the CMS programmes I could download over a dial-up connection. Then, one day, I stumbled across your fantastic site during my research and it inspired me to try out and use MT on a personal domain that has been parked for three years. As for the question: 'how has Blogger changed my life?', well, it made me realise that usually the best way of getting what you want is to do it yourself...
→ Posted by: s3d at February 3, 2003 12:09 PM