this is where it all started...

Here in Blogger, that's where I had my first blog. That was before Google bought them. At first, I was clueless about blogging so I wrote it as a very, personal diary and set it to public. After a while I got all freaked out -- «perhaps someone I knew would come across it!!!» -- so I took it down. I had not used my own name anywhere, but still.

Eventually Google came along. I thought that was such cool search engine, mainly because their page was so clean.

Time went by and at one point I started reading in the news that Google was going to launch a webmail! Back then, my screen name was «Webby» -- a name that was impossible to sign up for anywhere, it was always taken. I lived in Sweden then and when I made up the word Webby, I thought that was really cool because of the Web and my love of ducks [webby feet]. Little did I know that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people had already come up with the same idea.

Nevertheless, I really liked it and now that Google was launching this new and cool email service, I wanted to be among the first ones to sign up, so that I'd be able to get my 'name'.

In Blogger, I noticed a link that said something like 'get a chance to test drive Gmail'. That wasn't the exact wording, but that's what it meant. It took many attempts but on the 21st of April 2004 I finally had my first Gmail account!!! Gmail was launched April 1, 2004.

Now, the sign-up procedure started. «Choose a user-name» I carefully typed in webby and all my other credentials, hit the button 'create', and wouldn't you know...!!! It wasn't created. In red letters it said: «username has to be SIX letters». What a let-down! Here I was, thinking I was one of the early users, and I was, and now this.

Ended up choosing another word with seven letters, that I still use to this day. That's my primary email account, only for personal contacts ... family and so on. The little word is a medical procedure but with a little bit of imagination it can be applied to something else too.

Every now and then I get mail there that is sent in error ... links to confirm accounts! People sometimes sign up and find that the name is taken, so they add numbers to it and forget about the numbers, apparently, so they end up using MY email addy while signing up for different services. Sometimes they are even personal emails.

Anyway, thanks to Blogger I got Gmail!

Over the years, I felt that Blogger sort of ... stood still. Nothing new ever happened here, no improvements ...it was just same old, same old... Until now, about perhaps six months ago or a little more. They totally re-vamped it! The new template designer was a huge thing! You could edit your own theme before that, but that was probably very difficult when you had no knowledge about HTML or CSS. Not it's a breeze.

Then came the new photo viewer, that brings up all pictures in a so called 'light-box'. Personally, I think that's the most awesome part of it.

Yesterday, they announced that they had implemented 'threaded comments', and that was about time!!! Finally, there's a reply-link underneath each comment so that you can get some kind of order!

All in all, I'm quite happy with Blogger and I'm pleased with my moving back.