Jeffrey Veen and I will be conducting a one-day workshop in San Francisco a week from Monday, the 8th of November: Redesigning Blogger. We’ll be covering the process and thinking we used when Adaptive Path and Stopdesign worked with Google to simplify and redesign Blogger earlier this year. Jeff and I have worked together for a little over eight years now. We’ve learned a lot from each other, and from our successes and failures on various projects. We certainly didn’t always do the right thing at HotWired, making many mistakes while we were constantly experimenting. continued

While stationed in Washington, D.C., enjoying Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week, I’ll point out another project in which Stopdesign played a small role. Google recently launched another new feature for hosted-blogs that further improves the design and experience for Blogger’s users and all of their readers. In a bold move that meets a long-standing request by many of its users, Google recently removed the awkward ads on Blogspot-hosted blogs. In the ad’s place, a new, much slimmer navigation bar gets tucked into the top of the browser window, adding functionality to each blog continued

For those of us involved in the project, we’ve been waiting months for this day to come. At long last, I’m proud to announce the launch of a project representing the latest collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path: the redesign of Blogger.com. Congratulations to the entire Blogger team on completing hundreds of hours, and expending tremendous effort to fit so much into this launch. This is Blogger’s first major overhaul since getting acquired by Google in February 2003, and it’s a biggie. continued

Thanks to the recent news and hype of Google’s Pyra acquisition, it seems Blogger has been quite bogged down recently. Lots of transfer errors. Connection problems. Most likely due to every Blogger user trying to post about the story. Unfortunately, for the past few days, on each post attempt, Blogger has been deleting my entire archive list except for the most recent entry. Each time, I end up needing to republish the entire archive again. continued