Thank you, Blogger

I’m a little late in writing this. I meant to write this before moving over to Blogware, but as they say, “better late than never.”

I’d like to say “thank you” to Blogger.

Blogger got me started in the blogging game in the first place. Although I could thrown together my own “content management system” or simply done things the hard way by hand-coding HTML, Blogger was there, and it saved me the trouble of having to worry about technical issues and concentrate on what it is that makes a weblog: the writing.

The nice people at Blogger have impeccable taste; quite early on in the history of The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century (remember, in the Blogger blog it’s “AccordionGuy”, here it’s “Accordion Guy”), they declared it a “Blog of Note”. Remember, this was well before some of my better-known, wilder entries.

How many applications can you say changed your life in ways both subtle and extreme? In my case, I can’t think of any other than Blogger. Blogging most certainly saved me from a big world of misery: you might recall the story about the New Girl, in which my effusive blogging about a new girlfriend prompted a reader (who became a reader because she liked an earlier post of mine) to warn me that this new girlfriend was not whom she claimed to be. Through blogging, I widened my circle of friends; I’m sure it also played a part in landing me a very nice job at Tucows.

Blogging encouraged me to write daily, which improved my writing, gave me more discipline, and acted as a way by which I get a better perspective on myself. I understand that line about the unexamined life not being worth living more clearly now — since I write about what I do and who I am, I give more thought to what I do and who I am. That has paid off in spades.

As you know, I switched tools.

At Tucows, we’re rolling out Blogware, our own blogging tool, and as part of the Research and Innovation Group, I’ll be making my small contributions, giving direct feedback to the developers and of course, “eating our own dog food”. Blogware’s a good tool with a lot of neat features, and I like it a lot. For all these reasons, I made the switch from Blogger.

However, I wanted to express my gratitude to Blogger for giving me my start. Let me pay Blogger the biggest compliment I can: blogging — which I did via Blogger — has been just about as life-changing for me as the accordion has been.

To Evan, Steve and the rest of the crew, I’d like to express my thanks.