I love A List Apart. I really do. But is anyone bored of the anti-weblog riff? It’s a banal conversation at the best of times. It’s good that they are easy to build (html isn’t exactly the trickiest language itself – would it be better if you had to code in C++? Would the content be any good then?), because it makes the web less elitist – makes the information online and the ability to communicate available to everyone. And so what if you get a fair amount of crap? There are many more crap sites out there which are not powered by blogger than ones that are… If it makes a designer more lazy, well that’s his/her fault – not the fault of the tool.
It’s like my whole thing with Dreamweaver. I look at the tool and think to myself – why is this program popular? It’s an idiotic waste of space that generates messy, unclear, unreadable, fat and buggy code. And yet people use it because it makes their lives easier. I hate the program, but I can’t fault the content of some of the sites built with it. And Blogger doesn’t produce ugly code at all, it just provides a basic and surprisingly flexible way of working with daily content.
Or to put it in a more memorable way: Dreamweaver and Blogger don’t bore people. People bore people.
One final quote:
“What if everyone spoke their minds and actually put some effort into it? How about presenting who you are – what you are made of – what drives your inner being? Take a chance and create without bounds. Don’t waste the power the web has given us in a hit-seeking circle jerk.”
If you haven’t found a weblog that does this stuff, then you haven’t been looking very hard. And if you haven’t been looking very hard, then piss off…