From Magic!
to Publish your passions, your way

Blogger's October 1999 page fits its pitch and two account forms into a small blue rectangle in the upper-left corner. The wordmark is dark and lowercase. There is no orange B yet. Registered users can log in; new users choose a username and type their password twice, without leaving the homepage.

The instructions assume you already have somewhere to publish. Give Blogger a template, tell it where the posts belong, and a Save to Server button will FTP the new page to your web server. Your site. Your design. That is what the longer paragraph underneath the magic is explaining.

The last question asks where to enter a credit card number. The answer is shorter: Blogger is free. Below it sits a Pyra copyright line and a link describing Pyra as a collaborative website management tool. Blogger had launched on August 23, 1999, less than two months before this capture.^[1]

Blogger's November 2000 homepage has grown into a three-column page, with an orange B on the left and a long news feed in the middle. Fresh blogs run down one side; sign-in and signup forms occupy the other. The team posts its own updates under WHAT'S UP.

Keeping those posts moving took money. Wired reported in January 2001 that 191 users had donated $3,200 toward a server within a few hours of a fundraising drive.^[2] Readers were paying to keep a free publishing service running. The news-column homepage puts that small team close to its users: product updates sit beside press mentions and messages signed by the people building it.

The 2001–2003 captures keep the crowded columns. Blogs of Note gives the homepage another job: finding something to read after explaining how to write. Google bought Pyra Labs in February 2003, but our June capture still wears the orange B and the dense news layout.^[3] The big visual break comes in the next selected year.

Blogger's June 2004 homepage puts the news beneath a cream panel. Four little illustrations explain what a blog does; a numbered list handles starting one. Create an account, name your blog, choose a template. An orange arrow points toward signup, and the B now shares a blue header with a white Blogger wordmark.

The redesigned service launched on May 10 with comments, profiles and publishing by email.^[4] On the homepage, the question is now What’s a blog? The page explains publishing to someone meeting the idea for the first time, while the footer quietly replaces Pyra's name with Google.

Google needed a lesson too. Three days after launching its own official blog, the company admitted that it had published an unsigned recruiting post, then changed it after publication. The Blogger team had pointed out the breaches of blog etiquette.^[5] Google's correction names the author and explains the edit. Even the company that owned the publishing tool was learning how to use a blog in public.

Blogger's June 2005 page keeps the three steps, but the news underneath offers a shorter route: send a message to go@blogger.com. The May announcement explains that an email or MMS could create a blog and publish its photo and text; a code sent back to the phone let you claim the blog or move the posts to an existing one.^[6] You could start writing before opening the signup page.

The feature came with its own jingle. The homepage actually advertises it in the mobile launch notice, and the announcement calls it the first Blogger feature to get one.^[6] A musical extra gets space beneath the careful instructions.

Microsoft Word got a route in too. In August 2005, Blogger released a free add-in with buttons to publish, edit and save drafts from inside Word.^[7] A phone message and a word processor could both feed the same kind of public page.

The 2006–2008 captures retain the cream panel and blog discovery links. By 2007 the header asks existing users to claim an old Blogger account if they have not switched to Google Accounts. The new Blogger had left beta in December 2006; the homepage still had to guide people through the move.^[8]

Blogger's June 2009 page replaces the numbered signup with Create a blog. It’s free. The illustrations now describe the product: Your blog., Easy to use. and Flexible. The orange button remains, while a short list of links offers a tour and more features.

The homepage still sends readers outward through Blogs of Note. Blogger was nearing its tenth birthday: in June, its team said users were publishing 270,000 words a minute.^[9] That number describes activity across Blogger, not a counter on this homepage.

By September 2010, Beautiful templates. leads the benefits list and a link invites visitors to try the template designer. The supporting copy gets specific about layouts, fonts and colors. Your blog. and Easy to use. follow it. The page has started with the mechanics of publishing, then explained what a blog is; now it gives choosing a look the first position.

Blogger's June 2011 entry page trades the cream background for white and puts sample templates beside a Google Account sign-in box. Underneath are small illustrated promises: statistics, AdSense earnings and blogs to read. Template pictures now do some of the explaining that the old illustrated tour handled.

Publishing had recently stopped altogether. A maintenance release left Blogger unable to accept posts for 20.5 hours in May, according to the team's account of the outage.^[10] The quiet June landing page does not show that interruption.

The 2012 and 2013 captures shrink the logo and preserve the template previews beside the sign-in form. Behind that entrance, Blogger introduced a new dashboard and editor in August 2011.^[11] September brought seven Dynamic Views for public blogs, including magazine-style and flipping-tile layouts.^[12] The landing page, the author's dashboard and the blog a reader opens are separate surfaces. These captures show the entrance.

Blogger's selected 2014 and 2015 entry routes open Google's sign-in screen. One account. All of Google. sits above a smaller instruction to continue to Blogger, followed by the email and password fields. The separate template pitch has gone from these captures. The footer still offers a language selector and the familiar Google service icons sit beneath the form.

The account screen says little about what people are allowed to publish. In February 2015, Google reversed a planned ban on sexually explicit Blogger content after users objected, including people who had kept blogs for years.^[13] It reversed course before the proposed restriction took effect. That argument happened outside this spare entrance; the screenshot records the login route, not an announcement of the policy.

Blogger's October 2016 about page opens with Publish your passions, your way over a red cooking scene. A sample blog appears among kitchen utensils. The cream panel has become a stack of full-width colored sections: design, a domain name and earnings.

Scroll down the capture and the domain section makes a useful distinction. A blogspot.com address is free; a custom domain can be bought. Blogspot is where these hosted blogs live. It is not a replacement name for Blogger. The orange design section above it still talks about templates, layouts and background images.

The 2017–2021 captures keep that structure. The rotating hero shows cooking, technology or family sample blogs in our stills. Blogger announced four new responsive themes in 2017,^[14] then a responsive publishing interface in 2020.^[16] Meanwhile, blogs using Google+ comments lost that comment feature in 2019; those discussions could not be migrated into Blogger's own comments.^[15] Changes to the writing tools and the blogs continued behind a familiar marketing page.

Blogger's June 2022 capture keeps the red cooking scene but changes the line beneath the headline to Create a unique and beautiful blog easily. The earlier subtitle ended with It’s easy and free. Farther down the selected captures, Get a free domain becomes Get a domain. These are wording changes between our captures; they do not establish a change in price.

Our October 18, 2026 live capture still shows the cooking blog, the orange signup button and the same wide sections. The white Blogger wordmark is visible again in this live header; the archived 2016–2025 headers show the B symbol but no readable wordmark in our renderings. The logo sequence below shows the dark 1999 lettering, the orange B by 2000, the paired symbol and white wordmark in 2004, a later highlighted tile and the thinner modern lettering.

The 1999 page explained where the files went after you pressed a button. This one shows the page you might make and asks you to create it. There is still a button. The FTP instructions have given way to a picture of your blog.