The other night, Homer told me he was using the Wayback Machine to look at an archive of his blog. When I looked up my old Blog*Spot blog on it, I realized I could finally get screen captures of the way my blog has looked over the years.

May 2002

Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine doesn't have my first template archived. It was a basic Blogger template that I tweaked a bit. This was the second template. Behold the beginnings of my awesome Photoshop skills creating a PLAIN TEXT BANNER.

And check out the old school Blogger logo before they went all Web 2.0.

November 2002

This was one of my favorite headers. When I look at this I remember how long it took to turn that G into a guitar because I still had no clue how to use Photoshop.

May 2003

This is the only template I used that was aligned left instead of center. It was also the first time I veered away from the all blue & white theme.

October 2003

I forgot all about this one. I'm horrible with remember font names. I think this one was called Bird Brain or something. I thought it was a little funky and retro looking.

February 2004

Ah yes. The somewhat radical decision to defiantly have no blue. I kept this look for the remainder of my time on Blogger.

July 2006

My first design for this domain. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, even though I built it in tables instead of CSS.

Cuz that's how I used to roll.

My favorite part of the design was the mix cassette tape. There were twelve in all and they rotated some of my favorite albums. I'm not sure anyone ever noticed the tapes changed because no one ever mentioned it or asked me about it.

Hmpf.

So here's what they were:

• Rockin the Suburbs - Ben Folds
• 10 Cent Wings - Jonatha Brooke
• Come On Come On - Mary Chapin Carpenter
• Extraordinary Machine - Fiona Apple
• Say I Am You - The Weepies
• The Mysterious Production of Eggs - Andrew Bird
• Life, Love & Leaving - The Detroit Cobras
• Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco
• Plantation Lullabies - Me'Shell Ndegéocello
• Prozak for Lovers - Prozak for Lovers
• So Much Shouting So Much Laughter - Ani DiFranco
• Soul Journey - Gillian Welch

January 2007

And finally, the first appearance of the official logo for the site. Even though it may not look like much work to do, the logo took me a couple hours to create in Illustrator. getting it just the way I wanted before creating a custom shape to use in Photoshop.

Now

Last September I rolled out the current design which allows me to change out the banner more often without changing the whole thing. It's probably my favorite of all for that reason.