30 Day Blog Challenge - Day 2 (Revisiting Blogger)

The Day 2 prompt was to pilot a new piece of technology.  In this post I  walk down memory lane to a time when I chose to pilot a 'new' blogging platform (TypePad) and liked it so much I  stayed with it for nearly a decade.  Looking back at my first post on TypePad I find it ironic that I'm taking on the challenge of moving back to Blogger as my main blogging platform.   In January 2006,  I posted: 

JANUARY 06, 2006
Getting seriousIt's been almost 5 years since I started dabbling with blogs in education mostly for student projects in my classroom.
It's been about a year since "blogs" have started to really get the attention of the masses (marked by it being the most frequently looked up word in the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary)
It's been a few months since I selected "blogging in education" as a research topic for a few grad classes.
Finally... I've decided that it's time to get serious and start my own blogs with some serious blog tools.  Many of the blogs that really got my attention during my research project were done on TypePad.  Getting serious for me was shelling out a few dollars a month to discover blogging at the next level (beyond free blogging tools like Blogger and Xanga)
My goals -

1. To discover what features non-free blogging tools have and whether they are worth paying for.
2. To move from the  a user of  free blogging tools for educational projects  to a blogger who explores the process of blogging (not just the tools)
3. To update the format of my old web site to a more interactive format

Let's see what happens.

Typepad served me well and I enjoyed the professional look and feel.   So why switch back?

1. Blogger has evolved over the years and offers many of the features that I used in Typepad (though not ALL of them) 
2. I've come to live in the Google world more and more and it made sense to work within an ecosystem of tools designed to integrate well together.  
3. As I'm  starting to use and maintain several active blogs and become more and more active on Google Plus. Blogger and Google Plus integration might make the process of maintaining and moderating multiple blogs
4. Blogger is free - (although I will still be paying the annual fee to keep my Typepad blog as an archive for the time being)  With an increase use of blogging platform, I find myself enjoying having my blogs all in one place and Blogger provides me with that option. 

So my new technology will be to revisit Blogger and take Blogger to a new level,  and perhaps blog about the challenges and successes of doing this.   Interestingly enough,  with a few 'tweaks', my goals remain pretty much the same as they did in 2006.

1. To discover what features non-free blogging tools have and whether they are worth paying for.
   TWEAK:  To discover features of 'free blogging tools" that make full featured blogging accessible to ANYONE! 
2. To move from the  a user of  free blogging tools for educational projects  to a blogger who explores the process of blogging (not just the tools)
   TWEAK:  To continue to use free blogging tools as an easy publishing platform for educational projects as well as to become more regular about the process of blogging and do a little less "BINGE BLOGGING" 
3. To update the format of my old web site to a more interactive format.
   TWEAK:  To update the format of my old website to a more integrated format with other digital projects (i.e. Google+  and other digital projects that currently use Google tools) 

Let's see what happens. (do I hear an echo?)