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the blogger years

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the blogger years

I had already made attempts at my own "blog" with The Bitch Column in Sputnik 6! between January and April of 2000. Having to create a new page every day just for the sake of updating the column was more of a pain than it was worth. Nevertheless, I liked the format of being able to update my website on a daily basis with my most recent opinions and whatnot.

In the process of creating Planet StarRaver in late 1999, I had stumbled across imood and ended up putting an imood indicator on my website. Using their "Recent imood updates" list, I looked at a lot of other personal sites, and noticed a lot of other people who were creating personal sites with online journals similar to The Bitch Column. Every one of those sites had one of these Blogger buttons on it. I thought: What the fuck is Blogger? I finally decided to click on one and it took me to the Blogger website. I was still confused at first, but as I started reading the website, I realized that Blogger was exactly what I was looking for. Wow, someone had already created a system for me to make daily updates to my website without having to physically handcode a new page every day. It's like they read my friggin' mind.

By this point I was already in the process of planning for my new website with my own domain name. I ended up signing up for a Blogger account and setting to work on creating my new weblog, which would be the centerpiece and chief content of my new website. I had registered my domain name on June 8, 2000, and I spent the next month working on creating the template for the weblog, trying to understand the new specialized code, and configuring the settings so it would publish correctly. Finally, on July 3, 2000, my new weblog went live with several posts consisting of me spewing profanity at Blogger because I still didn't have the configuration just right. Eventually, I got the bugs worked out, and we were good to go.

For the first several months, I had the site hosted on Crosswinds. My old websites had been on GeoCities, but the draw of Crosswinds was that they promised free hosting and unlimited space. At 20-years-old, I hadn't fully come to terms with the cliche "You get what you pay for." Yeah, I got fucked over left-and-right. The first problem was that Crosswinds was going down all the time, meaning my site was never available. Next, some of my pages weren't loading, or if they did load, they were corrupted and didn't load properly. Then, they started randomly deleting pages from my website. I would try to access a page and it would just be gone. What?! Finally, as if things weren't bad enough, all of a sudden they wanted to start charging for hosting! Yeah, they fuck up, and then they want me to pay for it? I don't think so. Come December 2000, I moved to a new host, transfered the whole site, got the weblog reconfigured again, and got back to work.

Weblogs were slow to catch on at first, as one already had to have a website to have a weblog. That all changed when Blogger introduced BlogSpot. All of a sudden, EVERYONE had a weblog (or, at least, it seemed that way). Blogger's servers couldn't handle the explosion of new activity, which made updating the weblog a major pain in the ass once again. Entries would get lost as Blogger timed-out during peak periods, and even during slow times you took your chances with trying to update. But what could I do? If only someone created a program similar to Blogger, but without the problems inherent with Blogger. By mid-2002, I discovered the answer: Movabletype.