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Joe wrote about his history of self-hosting and wanting to own his own words, starting with Blogger. Ah Blogger! What a great trip down memory lane it was to see a reminder of one of my favorite tools from my early days.
Never did I think I’d miss the days of FTPing stuff everywhere when I was deep in the midst of it, it felt too hard to keep track of at the time. Macromedia Dreamweaver was my first real text editor back in the early 2000’s and its FTP features were actually a big part of why I loved it so much, not just for the WYSIWYG interface that taught me HTML as I went along. Dreamweaver had a rudimentary version control system that was a lifesaver. It’d show you which files were out of date on your own local side, or which ones were “locked” on the server because you or somebody else was working on them. It was a lifesaver in those days before version control systems became ubiquitous.
I eventually outgrew Dreamweaver and got tangled up in the “admin tax” of keeping track of stuff. FTPing everything was such a chore in the pre-GitHub world, but now I look back wistfully on that comparitively simple setup. And the best part of that entire tool chain was Blogger.
I loved Blogger so much that I used it for everything, whether work or play.
My first job out of college was at my college, as I turned my student job into full-time. I learned my craft by updating university websites and over time branched out into working at local agencies or freelancing. All while testing out my skills on my own time with my personal website, which started out as a blog, then became a portfolio, and then a hybrid of sorts.
Blogger started out as a toy hobby on the side, a way to write on the exciting new frontier that was the web while also deepening my frontend skills in self-directed ways.
The two worlds collided when I started using Blogger as a hack at work, turning it into a free and rudimentary CMS for the admin staff.
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I had a scrappy hack in those days for making websites that looked good while still being easy to update by normal people, like university staff or small business owners. I’d basically use Blogger as what we’d now call a headless CMS. My strategy was to have mostly a static site that didn’t look like a blog at all, with a little section carved for news that they could write themselves using the blogging admin panels.
These days, things like Wordpress support this approach right out of the box, with both static pages and dynamic sections for articles.
What was important back then was that Blogger was super approachable for my intended audience and that meant they’d actually use it. Which meant it felt just as empowering for me that I was empowering others - I could enable them to maintain their websites as a living, breathing thing.
You might have to understand the practices of the day to know how much that ran counter to what you’d usually see elsewhere. I wasn’t interested in hooking them forever as clients dependant on me, turning their sites into basically a digital brochure that needs to be updated before another print run.
At the same time, I also didn’t want them to mess up the overall design that I’d crafted so carefully. An updateable news section was a great compromise.
Over time I even did fun things to push the boundaries a little, like using Blogger as a backend CMS for Flash sites, which could import both simple text files as well as complicated XML files, so the blog’s RSS feed would become like a data store for embedding into multimedia projects.
I was heavily inspired by a mini site that Kodak made in 2002 about “the boneyard” - a giant storage area out in the desert for retired military aircraft. It’s sadly shuttered now but the memory of that early immersive experience has stayed with me over the years. I can still hear the simple lonely accoustic guitar string that would play in the background as audio clips of interviews would play.
This was a couple of years before YouTube. Frankly it was before the internet was fast enough to have video of anything larger than a grainy postage stamp. It was a novelty to see any kind of sound and motion, let alone something beautiful and moving like Sleeping Giants. They used what we now call the Ken Burns effect to make a slideshow with music and audio that felt immersive and moving.
It was such a clever strategy. Skip trying to make video on a slow connection look good, instead use great design and storytelling to make bandwidth-friendly images and audio feel like you really were out amongst the carcasses of these flying machines.
So like anything on the web I liked at the time, I found a way to co-opt it for work. I pitched my work on a Flash project with a storytelling focus and we did some really cool stuff documenting stories nearby local communities, mainly of indigenous tribes and their relationship as stewards of the ecology.
And of course I worked Blogger into it too. It was the best of both worlds - a Flash container on the frontend for the fancy multimedia storytelling and Blogger on the backend for updateable text blobs for news about the project.
I was so deep into the Blogger ecosystem that meeting the “team” behind the product was a shock. I say “team” because it was just Ev and Jason – two guys rocking up to the Adaptive Path conference in SF because they got free tickets as a small startup that organizers liked.
Of course I fanboyed right out. I still remember my “you mean it’s just the two of you?!?” reaction and begging them to do Blogger Pro, to please take my money and do well as a business. I was just a big fan, I didn’t know the inspirational backstory of how the company almost cratered and Ev slept on the floor to keep the lights on for the community.
Now looking back two decades later, I was also a bit young and naive about business in general. Even a relatively small amount of external investment starts a countdown clock that usually can’t be covered with a bunch of small individual payments. “The runway” is what we call it now – how many months can your company go before it has to shut down.
Plus people didn’t really pay for things online back then. It’s hard to imagine now with the climbing number of subscriptions on our bills now but for many years, getting people to pay for anything online was like getting blood from a stone. Jakob Nielsen wrote an article making the case for micropayments that sounded like utter science fiction.
So I don’t blame Blogger for looking for a soft landing. They became Google’s first ever acquisition, kicking off an M&A boom that lasted for decades.
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But back to my early days at my first job. Unlike my coworkers with CS backgrounds, I was self-taught and didn’t gravitate towards to their heavy power tools. Java, JSP, SQL… none of it really interested me. Or more accurately, they all got in the way of the brain cells that were already busily ingesting graphic design, interface design, usability research and testing, information architecture, Flash, photography, video editing, motion design… and anything else I could get my greedy little hands on.
My university job was the education that I’d been looking for all throughout my college years. I felt like I was in graduate school – I got paid barely anything but had a budget for books and conferences; my friends were the grad students in the labs all around my office and were all similarly underpaid, so we’d find fun free ways of entertaining ourselves with pickup soccer games or cheap camping trips; and most of all, we were all nicely tucked away from private industry in the safe familiar cocoon of campus life.
It’s not like I could really get a job anywhere else anyway, not while the earth was still cooling from the radioactive crater that was the dot com crash. Which was fine - I was young and broke, rent was cheap, and I really did make the most of my time in that productive little cave.
An idiosyncratic, self-taught, self-paced and entirely absorbing period of my life. A curriculum tailored exactly to my own interests, with tools of my own choosing.
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In hindsight, what I appreciate now about Blogger is why I loved it so much. It’s because I understood it. From front to back.
It was a great combo of being both powerful and simple, so I could use it to do amazing things without getting lost in the machinery.
The famous racing driver and team owner Jackie Stewart once said:
“You don’t have to be an engineer to be be a racing driver, but you do have to have mechanical sympathy.”
Mechanical sympathy. It’s an understanding that builds up as you become so deeply familiar with a tool that using it becomes muscle memory, no matter how complex its inner workings.
Formula 1 drivers are packed in tight into their cars, almost like they’re built into it like just another piece of engineering. The seats are thin, the heat and noise is coming off of the firewall behind them. They feel every bump in the road, every slide of the shifting grip of the wheels, every lurch of a missed gear shift, the gentle push of a tailwind, the strange gusts of crosswinds.
An F1 car is essentially built around the driver like Iron Man’s armor. A thick mechanical skin surrounding and cocooning the human at the heart of it.
And after all the years of experience with this kind of symbiotic relationship, competing in different racing leagues since grade school, drivers understand their cars on a deeply intuitive level.
Drivers feel their way around a racetrack.
Take away the adrenaline and it’s not that different from how us normies use beloved things in our life too. When you feel like the bicycle you’re riding is an extension of your body and you’re gliding down surface streets or a mountain path. When your text editor disappears and the words flow because your app of choice becomes an extension of your mind.
You build up mechanical sympathy for whatever you use the most and can understand completely. You stop thinking about how to use something when you use it so many times that you get a feel for exactly what it does.
That’s what Blogger felt like to me.
It felt like I had a power tool that I totally understood. Understanding it end-to-end meant I could keep an entire project in my head and deliver it as a one man shop. Using it for work and play, pushing its limits to use it in interesting and new ways. Mechanical sympathy.
I’m not the first to write about re-learning to appreciate the profound simplicity of markup. This week I was reminded of [Frank Chimero’s brilliant 2018 essay] and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
I missed that feeling for longer than I realized, until I recently started tinkering with my website again for fun. It became my little object that I can understand in whole, not just part, and yet also has complexity and room for growth. I find myself compelled to come back to it in my free time. Polishing it up. Trying new things. Catching up on old ones.
It’s not just a work portfolio to face outwards, it’s also for me to play with on my own. A worry stone, if you will. A writing mirror to hold up and examine my own thoughts. A slow rejuvenation of the intrinsic spark that came so easily when work and play mixed in the early days. An outlet and a playground.
I couldn’t believe my luck when I first fell into a career that I actually loved, as opposed to the ladders I’d been climbing all of my life in school before then. A new frontier that mixed art, science and business in unpredictable ways. A way of thinking that felt like it took the best of my engineering dad and artist mom, and yet also had my entrepreneurial spark that clearly skipped them.
So in some small and inexplicable way, going back to the simpler tools of my early career stir the same internal juices that I now need more than ever, here in this crazy sci-fi world that would’ve been so hard to imagine back then. And remind me of how lucky I am to be in this game at all.