The transition away from Twitter has made me question other online services. While I have been a free, open source advocate, I had my stint of administering my own server(s) at work to support Moodle and WordPress instances. The older I get, the less desire I have to spend tinkering at the command line interface (CLI) to get something done. Sure, it’s nice to think back when I was backing up and upgrading thirteen Moodle instances at a time, but then…there’s that time when some network guy forgot to switch out the external hard drive, and everything got nuked. Not a good memory.
That time, I had to call on someone to reinstall Moodle because I had run afoul of my PHP version wasn’t the right one needed for the MySQL/MariaDB I was loading or something like that. Stressful. I pretty much swore off LAMP set up and more on the spot. Since then, I’ve avoided that stress.
Time for a New Blog Platform?
I’ve been on blogger for a LONG time. In fact, my previous blog, what I started with was Thingamablog with over 7,000 blog entries (some of which I migrated to Blogger, but it wasn’t that easy back then), was hosted on a friend’s web server.
For a very long time, I’ve been on Blogger. Now that I’m using Mastodon and investigating other Fediverse tools, I’m thinking about switching off of it.
Blogger
As much as I hate Blogger, it has done a great job over the years. Let me count the ways I still love it:
- It doesn’t cost anything. It just works.
- It’s simple and easy.
- Schedule posts for publication.
- Exporting blog posts is easy as a backup and it’s well-supported by other blog platforms.
- It has an RSS feed.
Why don’t I like it? Well, it’s boring, doesn’t integrate with Mastodon/ActivityPub, etc. Ok, those aren’t very good reasons.
I’ve also been looking at other solutions, like WriteAs, WriteFreely, Substack, Ghost, and WordPress.com.
WordPress.com
For years, I’ve kept a backup of Around the Corner at WordPress.com. You can find my backup at https://jmguhlin.wordpress.com. The backup is completely free. I’d love to pay WordPress.com but I can’t explain well enough to the tech support that I need “mguhlin” not “jmguhlin” as the first part of the URL.
The problem is, I created that “mguhlin.wordpress.com” account so LONG ago, I don’t even have the recovery email account anymore (I don’t even remember what it is). I would probably just give in and use WordPress.com, but…until that’s resolved, I’m not that confident of switching over.
See what it looks like at https://jmguhlin.wordpress.com
Substack.com
Everywhere I go, I seem to run into Substack hosted content. This is one that I was introduced to via Mastodon. It’s free unless you want to charge subscribers and/or use a custom domain (mguhlin.org). I really don’t care about the first (I haven’t written this blog for pay), and the second is a onetime $50 fee. Not too bad.
I went ahead and loaded all my content into Substack. The process was painless coming from Blogger…I simply provided Substack with the URL to this blog, and then voila, it loaded all the blog entries in. Easy.
I almost made the shift but then I read some unsettling things about Substack. I’m not sure that I should switch over to them. But I do like Substack over Medium, WriteAs, WriteFreely, Ghost, and WordPress.com at this time.
You can see what it looks like at https://mguhlin.substack.com
What Do You Think?
So, what do you think? Should I stick with Google’s Blogger or switch to Substack or something else?
I suppose another option is to do nothing, doing incremental backups to WordPress.com and Substack.
Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure
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Hi Miguel,First, I think your blog has good graphic appeal. Unless you find it too time consuming to use or lacking in features, I don't know that I'd go to the bother of switching.I have a different problem: I've been using SquareSpace, a commercial hosting platform, for a long, long time. It costs me $129 a year. Now that I am retired, I would love to be able to move the Blue Skunk over to no-cost hosting site for what little blogging I do.But I don't have the technical expertise to export the 3,358 posts now on the site to a new one. I have gone through the posts a couple times and collected what I like to think are “keepers” that I am putting into a book format. But I don't know what to do with the rest of the mess.So, start over on a new site such as blogger? Hire a tech guru to export and re-import the old content? Or just suck it up and pay the price that SquareSpace is demanding, even thought I can no longer claim it as a business deduction?I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks,Doug
Doug, you should get a WordPress.com account and let it pull/copy content over there. Then, once it is there, you can either leave it there or someplace else. I am happy to help.This path offers hope for a happy transition:https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206566687-Exporting-your-siteMiguel
Thanks, Miguel. I will give it a shot! I knew I could count on your expertise!Doug
Doug, I look forward to seeing your blog on WordPress.com. If you should need assistance, don't hesitate to ask. Maybe you can get the work done during the Big Snow Storm of '22 or '23, depending on how the weather patterns work out. :-)After some deliberation, I decided to stick with mguhlin.wordpress.com as a backup site to this one. After all, why incur more bills than needed?I will probably leave the Substack blog up as well. As far as I know, there's no cost, and it's great to have a backup. Regards,Miguel
I'm on WordPress right now, self-hosted, but I'm thinking of switching to Ghost. They have a self-hosted option and a commercial version. The big reason I'm looking at them is the ability to automatically create email newsletters. Unfortunately, the commercial version can get expensive, but I guess that would be the price of success!
So funny, Miguel! I feel like we are thinking a lot of similar thoughts lately between Mastodon and now blogging! I haven't blogged much for the last couple of years and was thinking of starting up again, but I'm always wondering if I should get off of Blogger to have more options on my platform. So I pop over to your blog to see if you're still on blogger, and as I scroll down I find this post! Thanks for sharing your thoughts! You mention a couple of options I didn't know about, and I did not know I could back up my Blogger to WordPress, so perhaps I will start there and see where it goes. I'm also willing to start fresh on a new platform since I've had a bit of a break, but it's also nice to show one has longevity at something.