New Blogger Templates

I've been on Blogger since - whew - January 2004, so long ago I was at least three or four years younger than I am now. The service had only just been bought out by Google, was still widely known as blog spot, and was so basic at the time it lacked a user interface for template design - you had to do so in HTML - and you had to use a third party service for comments. In May of that year, Google launched a major redesign, with lots of improvements to user functionality including comments and the ability to post by email. Further updates followed in 2006, including a WYSIWYG template editor.

And then that was pretty much it. Apart from some minor updates of functionality, Google has pretty much ignored Blogger since then. Whilst they haven't gone so far as to shelve the thing all together, like the much missed iGoogle, it's been abandoned so long, here are the up to the minute options for comment log in:

If that was anymore of a throwback, it'd be using a Razr and playing Hey Ya. There's no support to add a more up to date method of commenting, such as Disqus or Facebook plug ins, either (although at least I have a scapegoat for my lack of comments in recent years). The user interface hasn't changed, there's no technical support, and even someone as change averse as I can't help wanting a little more up-to-date functionality. 

But despite Blogger being the Tiffany Trump of the Google suite, I could never quite bring myself to abandon it, just give up and head to Word Press (or, God forbid, Tumblr - though Tumblr hardly seemed like the right place to post about politics or be born prior to 1994).  

So it was exciting to log in this week and see that we have, finally, been rewarded for our many years of patience with some snazzy new templates:

Nothing like the breadth of options on Tumblr of course; to me, the exciting thing here is not the templates themselves, but what they represent: the possibility that Google has realised what an untapped resource they have in Blogger (and its users and potential users) and decided to pay some attention. But what the heck, shiny new things to play with are fun, too. I haven't been quite satisfied with any of my template tweaks and overhauls lately, and am going to have a play around and see what I come up with.