I used to be quite proud of hosting this blog myself. I hand-code these pages, and my RSS feeds, and FTP them to my host, then manually ping everyone I can think of to let them know there's something new to read. Great. Does have it's drawbacks though. Comments for one - if you send me a comment, it appears in my email - this gives me a sort of moderation. But then to make the comment live, I have to cut'n'paste it into my hand-coded blog page, and hand-code an entry into the comments RSS feed. Oh, and you can't do trackbacks either. And although I've managed to provide clunky permalinks for every post, they're not ideal in that they don't load a post in its own page, but rather load the relevant month's page and then jump you to the post within that page. And another thing (I'm getting warmed up now), I can't email posts in like I can with Blogger, or just go online from wherever I am and add a new post - I have to have my offline copy of all the blog files to hand on my trusty USB stick. Oh, and I can't use widgets, like a blogroll, and neither can I show a nice calendar-based hierarchy of my posts. Blogger lets me do all of these things and more - I know, because I host my fiction blog there.
There are reasons I do things this way - when I started blogging in 2005 the tools offered by the big blog hosts were nothing like as sophisticated as they are now. And I like the ease with which I can integrate the blog into the rest of my site. But here's a thing - my blog doesn't really go with the rest of my site any more, it just doesn't fit. But there are plenty of reasons to stay where I am, notably that the search engines of the world are full of links to my existing blog posts (though I could set up redirects for these). Mainly though, I'm put off by the volume of work it would take to move all the old stuff over from this location to Blogger.
So what should I do? Do you even care? Are you still reading? If you do, and you are, you can have a say on the matter, here, for the next thirty days. Cheers.
I voted 'move it to Blogger' even though I don't really mind either way. As you may know, I considered moving my own blog from Blogger to Posterous recently, but decided against it in the end for a variety of reasons. Blogger isn't perfect, there are things you can't do there and certainly Google policies that annoy me... but it's still a damn sight easier to use than WP.
ReplyDeleteYou raise a good point there, the things that Google (and others) do and don't allow you to post. That will certainly be a big consideration. Within reason, I can do whatever I like here. Although I'm sure Andy Gray and Richard Keys thought that too. Ooh, topical!
DeleteI'd be inclined to start afresh on Blogger with only new content (or only move the Jan 2011 posts) and link the two sites together. Shifting everything across sounds like an awful lot of work to me. And of course, you've still got the option of periodically republishing your favourite posts "from the archives" like you've been doing on Twitter.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting "third way" you've suggested, Mark. I think that if I do move, the whole lot will go over though. I know it's a lot of work, six years' worth of posts to cut'n'paste (thank God I haven't been more prolific) and lots of redirection to set up... but it's all or nothing for me, always has been - a fact that is usually more curse than blessing. Oh, and the "from the archives" tweets have generated precisely one extra page visit to the blog (and I think that was you).
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