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Posted: 08.12.2002
Blogger evolution
With all the blogiversary stuff flying around, Todd and I were joking last night that someone needs to make an evolution of bloggers chart. We both started off on Blogger (although we had our own domain and webspace already and skipped the Blogspot part). I lasted a few weeks, got fed up, and went to Greymatter. But Todd held out and stuck with Blogger for a few more weeks once he learned Movable Type was in the works. Then we shared webspace for a couple of months, with both of us running MT. Then I got my domain blogblogbaby.com (from Christine as a birthday present and I moved in with her on her copy of MT), so Todd decided that he needed his own domain as well. Then I got tampatantrum.com and moved to my own webspace. Which brings us to where we are today...

With that, I thought I'd take an informal survey of where you are now and how you got started. Did you use Blogger first (yes, no)? If no, did you enter your entries manually and then progress to another blogging tool -- or did you start off with another piece of software altogether? Do you currently use a publishing tool like Blogger, Movable Type or Greymatter -- and if so which one? If you've moved on from Blogger and the like, how long did it take you before you saw the need to upgrade to the big-kid blogging tools? No specific questions to answer really. We're just curious how your blogs have progressed as well...



Hey boy take a look at me...let me dirty up your mind...



Lesse. I wrote my first basic blogging CMS in 97 for a site I owned before there was a term for it besides online journal. Quit for a few years. Came back and used LiveJournal for a bout 7 months becasue I like all the community features but quit because they were down twice as much as they were up. I then went to Blogger, Blogger Pro and finally Movable Type because of the Blogger downtimes. I still use my Blogger Pro account for different stuff but my main site is using MT.

¤ ¤ credit: Jason | 08.12.02 at 03:22 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I have used blogger only for a year and I think I am about done with it. Want to help me with MT?

¤ ¤ credit: Chuck | 08.12.02 at 03:22 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started with LiveJournal, then fiddled with Greymatter for another site before finally settling on Movable Type. I realized the need to move almost immediately because LiveJournal hosts all of the blogs through its own database and doesn't permit much customization unless one pays. I wanted a bit more control over my blog, but it wasn't until I really saw MT in action on a variety of pages that I committed to the change.

¤ ¤ credit: Mariann | 08.12.02 at 03:30 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Ooooh, surveys! I like surveys! :)

I started off on xanga, one of those web community blog things. It was down constantly, and you couldn't do much to the look of it other than change the colors. So, I moved to angelfire and used blogger for a while, but blogger was down half the time too. I used a program called blog for a while, which was nice, but since it was a program you installed on your computer, I could only blog from there, which put a damper on things.

In April, Eric bought me my first domain and I tried to get movable type up and running, but failed miserably and decided to use greymatter for a while until I figured out how to get MT running. Just before May, I got MT working, and that's that for now.

¤ ¤ credit: Veshka | 08.12.02 at 03:31 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I disdained the actual practice of blogging for a while, having instead a Writings section on my portfolio site with manually coded pages. Then I crumbled sometime last August, signed up with Blogger and started making pithy comments about current events, just in time for the weblogging boom. I had to wrest control of my domain away from the FREAK who was screwing it up and find sanctuary with the lovely cgi and php enabled Hostmatters folks before I could install MT. Then I bought blogatelle.com and am now happily chewing up bandwidth like it's Juicy Fruit.

¤ ¤ credit: Sekimori | 08.12.02 at 03:33 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I had a tripod site, then moved to my parent's domain and had hand-coded updates. Decided I liked the idea of weblogs and did hand-coded entries for a month* (I think about two entries) then went to Blogger. Signed up for Blogger Pro when it came out and a couple of months ago, in honor of my year anniversary blogging switched over to MT. I'm happier now.

¤ ¤ credit: Morgan | 08.12.02 at 03:43 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

i used notepad and ftp for years. i started december 27, 1998, so i'm an old geezer. but i didn't switch to blogger until november of last year. greymatter in january of this year, and moveable type a month later.

¤ ¤ credit: redsugar | 08.12.02 at 03:43 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Diaryland. Blogger/Blogspot. BloggerPro/Blogspot. BloggerPro/Blogomania. MT/Blogomania.

¤ ¤ credit: wKen | 08.12.02 at 03:48 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Well, I started with blogger and my own hosting with the domain digitaldrivel.net - and after some failed attempts to get MT working, my friend Geek got it going and I haven't looked back.

¤ ¤ credit: Jim | 08.12.02 at 03:58 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

As an update to my own survey, techinically I started out "hand-coding" as well. The entry about my old "soapbox" site is here.

¤ ¤ credit: robyn | 08.12.02 at 04:00 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started out with Blogger. Had my own domain and space and all that. Moved on to Greymatter and really liked it. I went to MT only cause GM kept horking on me and I couldn't recover my archives when it would happen. Had a few GM guru's trying to figure out the problem, but they couldn't. So to MT I went. Happy with it. Need to give Ben and Mena some money here in the near future, need to upgrade to the latest version too.

Thats my story and I am sticking to it!

:O)

¤ ¤ credit: Jen | 08.12.02 at 04:02 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

It sounds oh so simple. I find a hosting service, I find a domain. I install Moveable Type. I transfer it. It scares me! But i seriously need to get off Blogspot!

¤ ¤ credit: Gert | 08.12.02 at 04:09 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Hand-coding, then evaluation of blogger, MT, and greymatter. The ability to customize MT sold me, so MT (at the muy fabulous blogomania) is the choice.

¤ ¤ credit: wendell | 08.12.02 at 04:11 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

hmm...
actually, it seems that i followed the same path as you did.. i started off with blogger, and really didn't last there long. i just wanted to see if it'd be something that i would be able to stick with. it wasn't. i then moved over to greymatter. i thought it was the greatest thing in the world, (and compared to blogger, it was). but, i found my busy schedule didn't allow me to blog as often as i wanted to, and ended up giving it up. i started back up again earlier this year with gm again(after a year hiatus). i finally got frustrated and switched servers to a movable type-friendly site, and have been loving it ever since.

¤ ¤ credit: datsum | 08.12.02 at 04:17 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I'm still thinking about what I want mine to look like ;-)

¤ ¤ credit: Tracy | 08.12.02 at 04:22 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started out manually updating my site. Then I just made it come from a mysql database and i entered the entries manually via phpmyadmin. Then i discovered blogger! blogger was good for about 6 months or so, then i decided to make my own back end. I finally got that going, then I discovered GM and MT. lol go figure. I was going to convert to those, but decided to eventually stick with what i've got, since i'm most familiar with it, and could make any changes pretty quickly. :) And that brings me to now. whew. it's a been a long road.

¤ ¤ credit: Yoshi | 08.12.02 at 04:34 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started out on Tripod, using HTML. I moved over to Freeservers about three weeks later and used a combo of HTML and that god awful Front Page Express. Sometime during the summer of 2001 I started using Blogger, got frustrated with the downtime and moved over to Greymatter, which I thought was wonderful but limited. In September 2001, after Freeservers shut me down from using too much bandwidth (my hits went through the roof from combination of 9/11 and the banned books project) I moved over to Dreamhost, got my own domain and installed Moveable Type. I just upgraded to the new version of MT last week. I will never use anything else again. I love MT. I love Dreamhost.

Happy blogiversary again. Long may you blog.

¤ ¤ credit: michele | 08.12.02 at 04:35 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Started out in Greymatter in April of 2001 and then I took a long break in September of 2001 until a few weeks ago... and I'm on MT now.

¤ ¤ credit: Amy | 08.12.02 at 04:39 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Experimented with blogger about 5 months ago but it looked crummy and was slow. Tried something else (I can't remember the name) but also wasn't happy. Tried movabletype and was hooked. Much easier to update and edit once you get past a little bit of an installation learning curve. Of course, once I had everything up and running my host went out of business, taking everything on their servers with them :(

Now I am back at a new host with a new name. WooHoo!

¤ ¤ credit: ben | 08.12.02 at 04:46 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Oooh, um... I've never used a blogging tool - when I started my site in 97 I used Tripod (Egad! Foul thing.) and two years later moved to my own domain where I've been ever since - but my stuff was always hand coded.

¤ ¤ credit: Green Fairy | 08.12.02 at 05:00 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started on Pitas. (Cringe!) Stayed there for about six months. Bought my own domain and switched to Blogger. Stayed there for a year. Just bought a new domain this summer and made the switch to pMachine. Home at last.

¤ ¤ credit: incognita | 08.12.02 at 05:46 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

started on blogger for about a week until I got my domain purchased and hosting set up. Been hosting w/ Druzba ever since.

¤ ¤ credit: Statia | 08.12.02 at 05:49 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

First off, Happy Blogiversary!

I started off a long time ago on LiveJournal and put a handful of entries in. I started a whole new blog with Blogger in April 2002 and am just now getting my domain name and a hosting service that allows CGI and PERL. I am moving to MT within the month if all goes well. Wish me luck!

¤ ¤ credit: Brian Peace | 08.12.02 at 06:00 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I owned the domain first. Then figured out what to do with it. Spent some time with BlotSpot. Then MT. I keep going back to Frontpage.

¤ ¤ credit: Matilda444 | 08.12.02 at 06:58 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started with LiveJournal back in 2000, then moved on to Radio.Userland - then when the 30 day trial ran out, I moved to MT - love it, and not leaving it!!!

¤ ¤ credit: Zaldor | 08.12.02 at 07:10 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Still using blogger, almost made the move to MT but things failed misreably thanks to our silly webspace provider. will be trying it again, thank god, as soon as we make the move to blogamania!!!
i just can't wait. It's been almost 11 months since we started the blog, and we have used blogger exclusively.

¤ ¤ credit: munin | 08.12.02 at 08:10 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Oh, I can't remember the date, but I started off in blogger with a blogspot account, and then progressed to Greymatter with my own domain. Then moved to MT on the same domain - stopped blogging and then registered my new www.bloganon.com so people I know in R/L don't read it. I think I started blogging because of you too, so it's all your fault!!

¤ ¤ credit: Jessica Parker | 08.12.02 at 08:21 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

My site started out in July '01 as a very infrequently (once a week, ish) updated diary at westnet.diaryland.com, (first post [since moved into the current site.]), and was written with diaryland's own tools. It also, for no particular reason, went for months with 90% of the entry titles being taken from the titles of Star Trek (TOS, TNG, DS9, and even VOY) episodes, as you can see on this page, listing all entries by date.

In December '01, my diaryland site moved into (and became the center) of my preexisting site running off my iMac (God Bless OS X), and became a full, daily(ish) weblog under the name The Table of malContents. The first official malContents post is here, though it took a while before Malc really found its style and format, such as it is.

Malcontents officially was always run by Movable Type, but was being tested for about two weeks, right up to launch, using Greymatter. I discovered MT at the last second, and never looked back.

(on a side note, well into testing, Malcontents was called "Poison Monkey Phlegm". Never was actually going to BE PMP, but I needed text there to test the design, and didn't have a name yet. ;-)

¤ ¤ credit: John Kenneth Fisher | 08.12.02 at 08:24 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

on a semi-related followup, I loved MT so much with malcontents, that eventually I used it to power some of the non-blog portions of my site, mainly the reviews and miscellanea sections. Excellent CMS. Anyone here not sure if it is worth the switch, trust me, it is.

¤ ¤ credit: John Kenneth Fisher | 08.12.02 at 08:31 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started off using Pita back in Nov of 2000. I just recently switched to Blogger. I like it ok. I've had my own domain snce Dec of 2000 but have never installed any "big-kid" bloggin software.

¤ ¤ credit: Ruth | 08.12.02 at 09:09 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Happy Blogiversary, Robyn.

I started in March with Blogger, then switched to Movable Type last month...but I liked my Blogger template, so I converted it to MT! It's not perfect, but it's home.

¤ ¤ credit: Solonor | 08.12.02 at 10:06 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started out trying to figure out how to hand code my "journal." It was fine for a while. Then I realized that what I was doing actually had a preferred name "blogging." After that I figured out that there are some tools around. Well, my host doesn't use MySQL which puts me out of the loop on a lot of stuff, and they have limited acces to particular PERL scripts which put me out of some other stuff. So I picked up this simple windows tool called... wait for it... "Blog"! It has served me well so far. But I am host shopping right now to make sure I get all the little goodies enabled and then I think I will most likely give p-machine a shot!

¤ ¤ credit: Stu D. | 08.12.02 at 10:15 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Let's see... I've been trying to get a website together since 1996; I used to just post my rants up on my various sites -- I started on Geocities, then Tripod, then after trying a few other free sites I figured out how to use ftp and started a website at one of my old web addresses (long since gone) -- I used a variety of html editors as well as Notepad. I tried to have a daily journal but for some reason it never got off the ground (that old website is here, still; one day it will probably disappear).

Then I found Blogspot and set up a site, which I quickly forgot the password too. Then I forgot about it. Then I discovered Livejournal -- here is the first regular webournal I was able to keep. Then I decided to get another blogspot account, here; then I finally got the money together for my own domain and started using Movable Type, which I had heard a lot of good things about. (And I liked the way blogs that used them looked, and Noah Grey had stopped working on Greysoft.)

¤ ¤ credit: Andrea Harris | 08.12.02 at 10:55 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone who's responded -- seeing all the various paths people have chosen has been most interesting!

¤ ¤ credit: robyn | 08.12.02 at 11:00 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Believe it or not I was "blogging" manually using DOS EDIT on a weekly basis back in 1996, took a pause in between, then back to weekly DOS EDIT. Hit Blogger in May and Movable Type about a month ago. Much easier now to type and press Submit. :)

-R.

¤ ¤ credit: Rick | 08.12.02 at 11:51 PM | link--this ¤ ¤

Hehe, well, I started out with greymatter last summer (August) at http://www.desine.net/journal/ I made it til February when I just got too busy. Then in May/June when I was redoing my site, I stumbled across MovableType and decided to check that out. Now (as of today) I'm using MovableType at my new home: Wanderlost.org! :)

¤ ¤ credit: ste | 08.13.02 at 12:21 AM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started on blogger.com and could only take it for about 2 weeks. Every time I wanted to post, the darned site was too busy for those of us 'non-payers'. I found Movable Type (thanks to TSS) and got it working in a little less than 2 weeks.

That was back in April and my wife and I have been keeping the family back home up to date since!

¤ ¤ credit: Scott | 08.13.02 at 02:45 AM | link--this ¤ ¤

I started with Blogger after reading blogs for a couple of years. I guess you and seki kinda got me over the hump...which is why I made you my parental units on blogtree (hope you don't mind),and if you don't mind please help me name my blog mom-I have a poll on my site right now that you can vote for my titles that I am considering or that you can email me your own. By the way I found it quite humurous that Todd registered his blog as one of your child's as well. Fitting, probably, if he is the type of husband that I am to my wife as she is constantly telling people she has three kids--one is 2, the other is 7 and the third is 34--which is a neat trick since she is only 29.

Blogger sucked imho so I gave upsaid.com a shot. Pretty cool and they have been very reliable and have really helped with my php education. If I continue to grow I will definately move to MT and let you and/or staci make things perfect for my blog, but for now I am happy --if I could just think of a decent name.

out

peat

¤ ¤ credit: peat | 08.13.02 at 12:21 PM | link--this ¤ ¤




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