almost effortless

Blogger switches to a dynamic platform after years of serving static html. I know not many people will appreciate it, but this is really interesting news. I'm pretty amazed at the transition, but I'm also kind of wondering about how long it took.

...You see, static serving was at one time a feature, in fact, the enabling feature of Blogger, because it allowed Blogger to publish via FTP—i.e., you could serve your blog off an entirely different host than Blogger was running on (like evhead.com, for instance), and it worked with virtually any web publishing system. It also allowed us to serve a tremendous number of web sites off very little hardware.

The limitations to static publishing, though, are significant and are the reason that Blogger hasn't had these types of features (and many more) in the past.

Converting the entire operation to a dynamic model meant essentially replacing the entire architecture, which is likely serving tens of millions of pages a day. This was a daunting task. But the team got it done (messy transition process still to come). And now much, much more is possible.

Was it really that big of a change to move over?

I mean, Wordpress can move the other way, and that seemed to happen relatively quick. Moveable Type did it as well, I believe, but neither of those have been centrally hosted in the past.

I wonder, too, if Wordpress might start to stagnate being centrally hosted. I don't know why that would be the case, but my fear is that centralized hosting might undermine your ability to innovate. Although, I can see how supporting thousands of distributed installation would be somewhat daunting. Plus, I've seen a lot of activity in the WordPress community that seams to have been enlivened by the recent funding that Automattic recieved.

I'm just looking for a reason why the Blogger upgrade was so difficult, although maybe it was just that they only recently made the decision to move.