July 12, 2004
Why Blogger?
In short: no particular reason...
When the Web started to become popular, I thought (along with every other high-tech worker) about creating a web site. I did start running a web server at work and wrote pages for my team, but I never got around to putting any real content in the web space provided by my ISP.
When "social network" web sites came out, with pre-canned templates for adding pictures, contacts, profile information, and so forth, they didn't interest me. I had gotten used to the power and flexibility of fully controlling the HTML (and CGI scripts).
The phenomenon of "blogging" really came to my attention in 2003. I started to read some blogs such as Joel on Software, Doug Pappas's Business of Baseball weblog (alas, Doug unfortunately passed away while on holiday earlier this year), and The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen, a Microsoft employee.
When I got hooked on CSS, I got the itch to write articles about miscellaneous topics, much like the blogs I read, laying out the results with CSS. I thought a blog that allowed me to specify my own templates and fully control the display with CSS might be fun to try.
I tried to find some objective reviews on the relative advantages of different free blogging web sites, but didn't find much. So I just looked at three sites I stumbled across while surfing the web: www.xanga.com, www.blogger.com, and www.bloglines.com. When I realized Xanga would only let me have a limited number of links to external sites, it was out; and Bloglines didn't have a clear statement on copyright issues. So I'm going ahead with Blogger, trusting that their web hosting service, Blog*Spot, won't suddenly and quietly revise their terms of service (which they have reserved the right to do).
Posted by Isaac at July 12, 2004 7:54 PM