A Long Overdue "Thank You"...

As 2011 comes to a close, it's typically a time for folks to sit back and reflect on the year that was.  In doing such there are a lot of "thank yous" handed out, the recipients usually being friends, family, supporters, and the like.

Thank you for being a friend...

Not wanting to buck this trend, I'm finding it necessary to thank a sort of unsung hero that makes things happen on a regular basis around here.  No, I'm not talking about Lilly, Owl Jones, The River Damsel, or even that guy named Clif. 

See, the person, or better yet thing I'm talking about is Blogger.  

You know, the platform that hosts and is the engine behind many of "our" humble blogs...  

Yeah, that Blogger.

Okay, I know Blogger's not perfect.  Like any good relationship, we've all had our ups & downs this year; some of the "downs" being the temporary inability to make comments, disappearing blogrolls, and confusion about what happens to your blog if you delete pictures from your Picasa account.  (You know Google tried to take over the internet this year, so integrating a billion different products had some nasty side effects).  

Also, just as in some unsteady relationships, especially a long term ones, one may have found themselves lusting for another.  Temptresses such as WordPress and all her curvaceous themes and sexy plug-ins...or Tumblr and...well...let's face it, Tumblr's too young for you...you'll get yourself arrested for fooling around with that one... 

thong shot courtesy of women fishing in bikinis

But in the end, it's the good times experienced in the relationship that definitely outweighed the few rough patches in 2011 that were mentioned above.  The Blogger team introduced to us a ton of slick updates, the biggest being a whole new user interface that is much more...ummm...Google-ish.  We also got web fonts, an Android App, mobile templates, favicons, dynamic views, and Google+ integration just to name a few from a very long list of positives. 

And for what it's worth, and in my opinion it's worth a lot, I also can't remember a single time when my blog was down...like totally black...in 2011.  Oh yeah, and I never, EVER had to worry about "installing updates."

And did I mention the best part?  Blogger did all that for free.

So THANK YOU BLOGGER (and your overlords at Google), for keeping not only my blog, but the many, many other blogs I enjoy on a daily basis not only up and running, but also doing so in a way that makes it so easy even Howard can do it.