Last updated on February 12th, 2019 at 01:50 am

A look at the state of the blogger platform in 2007 and the changes over time

The introduction of CSS 3 has seen in the development of ultra-modern blogger template. As the cotton is about to close in the year 2013, allow me to draw your attention to the top 10 best of the best blogger templates in this year of great wonder.

So many of you didn’t get the chance to experience what blogger was like as of 2007. But for those of us who did; we can confidently say that blogger is far much improved beyond anyone’s expectation. Thanks to stiff competition from other blogging platforms, our beloved blogger platform has evolved from the old static single-page blog to a pure masterpiece for professional bloggers.

Blogger as of 2007

“Back in the latter part of 2006, Blogger had released the new layout templates out of beta, which meant many bloggers were enjoying the flexibility and ease of widgets, easy customization and better publishing.”

Amanda Kennedy

+Amanda Kennedy wrote on her Blogger blog,

“Though the changeover may have been somewhat difficult for some, many new blogs had sprung up offering their insights and experience of this new system, including Testing Blogger Beta and Blogger University, paving the way for many “new Blogger” hacks to be developed, and helping other Blogger users to realize the full potential of this excellent new feature.”

Amanda Kennedy

January	In January Blogger began to support the “Custom Domains” service which enabled users of the new Layouts templates to link top level domains to their blogs.
Febuary	Blogger announces the release of the API which will allow bloggers to develop their own Blogger widgets. This meant that in addition to using generic widgets and pasting the HTML / Javascript into the widget boxes, one could create his own and offer them for others to use in their blogs using a simple form.
March	Newsreel and Video Bar was released. The Newsreel adds a stream of headlines from Google News to your widget based on keywords you choose when installing the widget in your blog. The Video Bar uses your chosen keywords to find suitable videos from YouTube and Google’s Video Search.
April	Hindi transliteration was introduced, and also Blogger was translated into Nederlands, Türkçe, Dansk, Norsk, Svenska, Suomi, Русский, and ภาษาไทย (bringing the total number of languages to 19).
May	The old blogger interface was dismantled and auto-saving for new blog post was introduced.
June	Blogger in Draft was introduced, where you can use and review features unavailable in the regular Blogger dashboard.
July	Feedburner redirection was introduced to blogger. Before now, feeds and main blogs were treated as an individual entities.
August	Blogger marked their eighth birthday with the introduction of video uploads, allowing bloggers to upload their videos directly through the post editor.
September	Blogger uploaded Blogger Play for public use. Using this nifty little feature, you can view an endless stream of the latest photos which Bloggers have uploaded.
October	Feedburner e-mail subscription was introduced. Making it possible for blog readers who subscribe to your blog updates to receive updates each time a new post is published.
November	November’s latest Blogger widget was the Slideshow, which allows you to create a dynamic show of your favorite photos from Flickr, Picasa or any other service which supports media RSS.
December	Blogger reflected on their past achievement and promised to do better in the following years.

Back in 2007, blogger is a different story from what you see now, though a force to reckon with and notably the Blogger’s Choice Award winners in November 2007, yet they could not hold on for too long. 

In this section we shall consider why many people turned their back on blogger in the year 2007.

• Lose of Ownership: Back in 2007 Google will delete your blog once it is flagged as spam, as a result of that many people left the blogger platform in fear of building a mansion in a fool’s paradise. However, things have changed now, Google’s reason for doing that was to discourage spammers from using the blogger platform, that purpose has been achieved. Unless you find yourself on the wrong side of Google, there is no way your blog is being deleted.
• Reputation: As a result of Black hat SEO, spamming and making affiliate landing pages by some bloggers (or more appropriately *spammers*) in 2007, blogger were viewed with disdain and a few others feel that the blogger platform is free and shouldn’t be used by professional. In recent times, the like of +Mohammad Mustafa Ahmedzai  of Mybloggertrics.com, +Syed Faizan Ali of Mybloggerlab.com and +Jide Ogunsanya of Ogbongeblog.com, has proven that the blogger platform could be used professionally.
• Plugins and support: During the 2007 era, WordPress could boast of thousands of plugins and a very strong community for support. In this era, you can come across over 900+ websites rendering blogger tutorials [We are enough support, aren’t we? :)] And blogger widgets. Blogger now can boast of a stronger community than any other cms in the blogosphere; because here, it is down to everyone.
• Orthodox Favicon & Navbar: This wasn’t much of an issue but certainly was an issue for some bloggers who felt they are not giving enough freedom to brand their website. The modern blogger platform allows you to change the default favicon and also turn of the navbar from the Dashboard >> Layout.
• Search engine optimization: This is an old joke: That the blogger platform is not search engine equiped. In the real sense, the blogger platform is very SEO friendly, with the new addition to the modern blogger platform such as custom permalink and custom robot.txt for each post, you can now stay long as safe on SERP.
• Theme and templates: The major difference between blogger and other cms such as wordprss in the era of 2007 was the fact that blogger templates in one word is ‘pathetic’. What do I say today? ‘Awesome’ in one word. Blogger has improved in the recent years, introducing dynamic views for PC and mobile (can be found in dashboard >> template). Also many third party templates have been at its disposal and many more to come. Here is a list of the top 10 for 2013 entertainment and technology blogger.
• Ads & Earning: It is no secret that some ad servers such as Infolink and buysellads will always prove a hard nut to crack when it comes to approving blogspot subdomain. I’m sorry, nothing has changed about this, I really think you should get a top-level domain name for your self. With Namecheap, you can get a domain name for about $3.6 or less than that. If you need help on how to acquire or set up a custom domain name for your blogger blog, let me know about it.
• Crappy Comment System: A lot of bloggers will be looking at this point with a “bitch please” on their faces. But back in 2007, a lot of fuss was made about the blogger default comment system, leaving many people with no option than to use a different comment system on their blogger platform, others who couldn’t handle the situation simply moved on with a different cms. Google, recently has introduced a Google+ comment system to blogger platform and can be enabled in the dashboard >> Gooogle+ in your blogger account.

Bottom line

Basically, every blogger started with the blogger platform, some progressed into being masters of the trade while others could not cope with the system of things. Whichever category you find yourself, you sure have a story to tell. 2007 was a very memorable year for every blogger that has used the blogger platform, tell us what you miss most and what you are happy to see on the blogger platform.