August 5th is Blogger Day

Today is Blogger Day ...

Blogger is celebrated each year on August 5th.

This day celebrates one of the first blogging platforms, Blogger. 

I am writing 2 blog. 

• This one UX for Dot Com is my blog about User Experience and E-Commerce. This blog is existing since March 2009  or   4905 days or 700 weeks and 5 days 😎  and it is amazing to see how quick our digital world changed, as things fell out and is the world is faster and faster developing.
  
  
• My other blog I started after my wife died on her own terms. On the one hand this blog is about tips for dealing with grief and on the other hand to help others in challenging times and in worst case death with dignity WX Widow Experience

Why I am blogging

Before I created my own blog, I was always curious as to why people time, hours, day, ... to creating new content, what the biggest attraction to blogging was and why it was becoming such a popular thing and career in many cases for so many people. Over the past years, I’ve been able to learn these things for myself and I now completely understand why so many fall in love with blogging and all the positive aspects that comes hand-in-hand with it. 

So, here are just two things I love about blogging and the things I plan to keep in mind the next time I might be feeling unmotivated with my content or my platforms 😃

Ideas and Innovation - being creative
I love being creative with different projects and ideas and blogging allows me to express that. I love thinking of new content ideas, ways of making topics that are personal to me interesting and unique. And I am writing about topics either I am super curious, happy, frustrated, .. any thing that touched my heart as designer. Blogging isn’t just about the writing, it also entails many other aspects, those of which help me to develop new skills, things that I hope I can apply to any improvement I might have or use in the future.

Readers, people, community and others
When I first started blogging, I didn’t expect to branch out in terms of talking to new people, I started following fellow bloggers, commenting on their posts and so on, I realised what an amazing community that coincides with this whole blogging environment. The blogging community is also an incredible one and I love how so many bloggers join forces to encourage, support and motivate each other, it’s amazing to be a part of. I love viewing at things from different standpoints, picking holes in arguments, turning a negative into a positive and blogging has given me the platform to share how I do that in my day-to-day and business life, it allows me to reach an audience which I never imagined I would and I can only hope that what I’ve written and what I will write in the future will help others out there. Even if it’s only one person, it makes everything worthwhile.

And writing is anyway an experience for me as I am thinking in pictures - that means listening, writing etc. mean to me I have to decode my pictures into words and sentences - and vice versa. 😏

History Of Blogging and Blogger

Blogger was launched in August 1999, by Pyra Labs. it was one of the earliest applications that was dedicated purely to publishing blogs. In 2003, Google purchased Blogger under terms which hadn't been made public. In parallel to this switch Google made the premium features of Blogger free of charge. In 2004, Google purchased Picasa and made a move to integrate Picasa into Blogger. The significance of this was that it gave Blogger users the ability to post photos to their blogs - pretty unique in these days. In 2004 Blogger got as well a complete new design and number of features were added, including posting by email, comments, individual archive pages for posts, and web standards-compliant templates. Since then a number of minor changes. 

The Battle Between Blogger And Others

Yes, things have changed in recent times, with new players entering the market and a lot of bloggers focusing heavily on ... what a surprise ... focusing on target groups ...

Blogging Platforms and Blog Sites which rules the market of today are ...

• WordPress — Best overall much more powerful than Blogger
• Wix — Best for beginners and getting more and more share of the market
• Squarespace — Best for artists, and designers
• LinkedIn — Best for networking.
• Medium — Best for writing to a built-in audience.

Unfortunately, I have seen Blogger decline a lot in recent times. It now powers less than one percent of the web. Blogger, on the other hand, has fewer features, and that is why I like Blogger - reduced to the things I need - a simple platform and so it is perfect as all I want to do is start writing straight away and not been blocked by any setting, selections etc.!

How to start blogging with Blogger

Nothing is more easy that that - if you have an gmail-account it is only one click away. All you need to do is create an account on Blogger. If you have an gmail-account you will find the Blogger icon and access to Blogger by the menu button in the upper right corner. You can then enter a name for your blog and select a blog URL or address. Next, pick one of the templates. Click Create Blog and you’re good to go! See how easy it is!

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