Andy Chase

Blogger cred
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

Five years ago, before anyone knew what the hell a "Blog" was, I carried my trusty HandSpring Visor Deluxe with me everywhere I went, full of content from AvantGo.

AvantGo was a proto-aggregator, delivering content to a Palm/PocketPC reader application via "mobile friendly" web sites set up by various media companies. Mostly is was sites like Salon and ABC news, but one day a coworker at Stan Lee Media, knowing I used AvantGo daily, referred me to an "AvantGo Blogger Client". If memory serves, somebody had created a tool that would format a Blogger weblog for friendly consumption by AvantGo. I don't remember if Blogger offered automated RSS feeds back then, or whether it worked by just scraping Blogger pages.

I signed up for a free Blogger account, made one post, and never touched it again. At the time, the notion of an online service to sign up and post nuggets of content in chronological order was puzzling, and I was much more of a He-Man about Doing Everything Myself when it came to all things web-site related.

I recently dug up my account and was surprised to find it still active. I think it's about to be pressed back into service, and it's kind of neat to have that "member since 2000" geek cred there... like I was hip to this blogging stuff before it was cool.