kartooner.com

Three or four years ago I set up an account with Blogger. Initially it was used to maintain news updates at a younger version of kartooner.com. Whenever I’d find a tidbit from the vast archive of the web I’d write about it with Blogger.

At the time I used an ‘iframe’ to incorporate Blogger’s blog*spot into my site. This was before Pyra Labs used banner ads and it didn’t look as obstrusive as it does today. Eventually I outgrew Blogger so to speak and contacted Six Apart to install Movabletype. Prior to this I had heard good things about Movabletype and it was either MT or Greymatter, which had fallen by the wayside due to lack of features.

I paid Ben Trott (second half of the Trott overlords) 20 bucks and he installed it in about 24 hours time. I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment that I was now using a CMS, flaunting it to my wife, who, understandably could care less. She was just happy I had something to write my thoughts with, so to speak and all was well.

When I switched hosts I remember the feeling of dread, thinking; “Oh no, I can’t shell out another 20 bucks for MT. What to do?” and so after a few Google searches I learned how to CHMOD (or change mode properties) on files via either FTP or a Linux/Telnet client. With my newfound power of CHMOD I studied the Movable Type installation documentation and taught myself how to get it to work.

Since that point I’ve had great success working with Perl, PHP, Javascript and a slew of other web scripts. It was only a matter of investing the time to learn how it worked and applying this knowledge accordingly.

Flash forward to May of 2004 when Douglas “Wired” Bowman and Adaptive Path announce the unveiling of the redesigned Blogger (I almost spelled blooger). To put it lightly and quite honestly I am floored by the re-coding and design tweakage that Bowman and team have accomplished.

In fact I dusted off my Blogger accounts and I’m happy to report that it’s fun again to work with Blogger, much as it was years ago.

The fresh and inviting design makes me want to explore it further despite its limitations. Unlike MT it doesn’t support plug-ins but utilizing Blogger code you can just as easily change the templates to your liking or use the 25+ new templates created by none other than Dave Shea, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm and others.

Thank you Google for breathing new life into Blogger.