Blog me baby!

So I’ve been reading a bunch of people’s online diaries lately, and it just reminded me of how I really wanted to make frequent posts on my website, but couldn’t be bothered because it was a pain in my ass. I had to manually update the web page, and the thought of any kind of archives made my head hurt. I would have to make a separate archive index page with links to each individual archive, and then manually make each month’s individual archive page etc.
Thus these free online diaries seemed appealing because all the work is done for you. You type it in and, POOF, it’s on your diary page. I really wanted to have my random thoughts page be on my own website though, and be consistent with my background, fonts, and so on. I had heard much praise about www.blogger.com, so I decided to check it out. Now up until today, I had thought they were just an online diary like the others I had seen, but to day I found that they could also provide exactly what I was looking for. You can set up your blog to automatically publish your entries to your own website, and automatically maintain archives. To get it exactly the way you want it does take a good bit of tinkering (well it does for someone like me anyway, who knows very little about HTML.) It took me from about 9am this morning until about 2pm to finally get everything working and configured exactly how I wanted it (again probably due to my extremely limited knowledge), however I now have pretty much exactly what I was looking for; an easy way to just type a post and click enter, and have it added to my own website and update the archives.
In short, I LOVE BLOG! Now I’m sure I’ll find it’s not perfect, but it’s the damn coolest thing I’ve seen yet for anyone wanting to maintain a diary, or post random rants, raves, and thoughts on their own website. Even if you don’t have your own website, you can still keep a public blog on www.blogger.com. Time will tell how I like the layout compared to some other sites, but for the moment, I’m quite filled with geeky joy.