My Own Worst Enemy
While catching up on email a few days ago, I wrote a short message to a friend I have not heard from for some timeinquiring how she was. She writes a blog over at Blogger, and given my own laziness, and the ridiculously small amount of effort I had not made to leave the confines of WordPress or Tumblr to keep up with her blog, we were in danger of losing touch entirelywhich would have been unforgivable, given how long we have known each other.
I think that last sentence needs splitting into two or three sentences, but I can't be bothered to re-write it. Of course I was bothered to write this entire paragraph, which makes no sense at all really. It's been a bit like that around here recently.
So anywayI wandered over to her blog this evening, and started reading, and remembered why I began reading her blog in the first place. She writes wonderfully. A small part of my brain started spinningwondering why I wasn't writing at Blogger any more (my personal blog has lived at Blogger serveral times in the past). Half an hour later I had exported the last couple of years worth of posts from WordPress, downloaded a long-since-abandoned Python project to convert WordPress export files to Blogger format, and loaded the posts into Blogger. And then I caught myself.
What the hell was I doing? As if proving my own idiocy, I pulled the newly resurrected blog up in a browser window, and resized the window. Of course it broke. Blogger pre-dates responsive websites. What was I thinking?Ten minutes later I found myself reading the technical blog over at Posthaven. Back in the day, I had a Posterous blog (before Google acqui-hired half their dev team, and shut Posterous down). Posthaven grew from the ashes of Posterousa $5 a month service to host your blog, and to never change or go away. While reading their various news posts, I ended up looking at Google Trends, and typed in WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. Of course Tumblr destroys everything else in terms of searches, because it's filled with reblogged content. If there was some way of filtering the results down to original content, WordPress would undoubtedly win by quite a margin.
Along the way, I entered the name of my own blog into Google, and was somewhat surprised to find that nothing came back. Actually, that's not entirely truethe Tumblr version came back, and the deleted LiveJournal came back, but not the WordPress one you knowthe one I have been posting into for the last several months.
I started scratching my head.
After a little thought, I logged into Google Webmaster Tools, and added the sitemap to the Google queuewhich is kind of like shouting at Google to force them to go crawl over your site, and index it all properly.
A few minutes later, I sat staring at the monitor in the study, and started grinning. I shook my head. I've been here beforetinkering with blogging platformsentertaining ideas of migrating the content. I then did what I always do in such circumstancesdeleted all the other blogs, and quietly returned to WordPress.