We recently celebrated a birth at 20FourLabs - the birth of our newly revamped and rebranded blogging engine, Letterdash.

The launch was a culmination of an intensive gestation period, during which Letterdash’s much loved but now outdated predecessor (24.com Blogs) was completely overhauled. Our emphasis was on maintaining the functionality that our blogging community had come to love while giving them more freedom to customise their pages.

We took the opportunity to introduce the basics that bring it up to par with more established platforms, like friendly URLs and support for personalised domains. We’ve also introduced tools to easily promote their posts to their email contacts, improved our search and tagging systems, and employed best practice SEO.

This is just the first phase of the upgrade which will continue into the coming months and years, and which will see us take the system into unique and innovative places.

This is why we chose to build the platform from the ground up rather than deploying an off-the-shelf system like Wordpress. We did this specifically so that we could shape the life of the product from the word go, and have the freedom to take it in new and unexpected directions.

Already Letterdash is far more than a blogging system - it is a community forum, a dating site, a social network and a support group hub all rolled into one. We want to be able explore all these tendencies, to develop them, and to make the product as unique as its audience.

Throughout the next year we’ll be rolling out a host of new features - all driven by community wants and needs. We invite both Letterdash bloggers and the general public to tell us exactly what they want, what they like and what they dislike.

We’ve learnt a lot from this experience, and we believe that every launch after this one will surprise and delight our loyal bloggers, and you our readers. In the meanwhile we invite you to comment below with any suggestions or questions you might have.