On May 1, Blogger will no longer support publishing to FTP, which is how I currently publish this blog. Sometime before then–hopefully this weekend–I will be migrating either to Blogger’s hosted solution or to WordPress.
I’ve thought about shifting to a different platform for years. The reason I’ve stayed with FTP publishing for so long is that I felt comfortable and safe with two copies of my blog in existence: one in Blogger’s database and one in static html files on my server. With this duplication of my content, essentially an automatic backup, I was confident that I’d never lose my posts. That made me reticent to change blog software.
Now that my hand is being forced, I’m leaning towards self-hosting. Frankly, I trust my webhost, pair, more than I trust Blogger’s servers. This may be a misguided view, but in the eight or so years I’ve used both services, I’ve only ever had problems with Blogger.
The main uncertainty in my mind at this point is WordPress. I’ve seen so many WordPress blogs get hacked and wonderful content get destroyed, notably the several times it happened to Sushicam. If, after losing all my offline writing and photos in the fire, I lost all of this too, I would be completely decimated. I do not want to go through that feeling again. I want to continue to be able to travel back in time through my writing and remember what I used to think about and how I used to feel. This blog is really all I’ve got left of my life before August 2005. I can’t lose it.
Obviously, I’m still thinking about what I want to do. But a decision will come soon, and then my blog will move. When that happens, the design will probably change.
I’ve also made a change to my photo posting recently. For awhile there I was emailing photos from my phone directly to this blog, to quickly and easily share what was going on. However, I was never really a fan of doing things this way. For starters, it saved the photos here on my server instead of on my photo site. For another, having a bunch of posts with nothing but one or two photos in them took up a lot of space and pushed text content–my thoughts, the real purpose of this blog–down the page.
So I’ve started using SmugShot again, the SmugMug application for iPhone. Now I simply send the photos I take directly to the proper album on my photo site. So far I’ve sent photos to February 2010 and March 2010.
When I switch my blog to whatever I switch it to, I plan to pull my latest SmugMug photos into the sidebar, so blog visitors will know I’ve uploaded new photos without having to scroll past them to get to my real content. I’m pretty happy with this solution and look forward to implementing it.
Once all these changes are in place, I plan to really get back into writing here. I miss it.
Wow, you sound all professional and stuff. :) I need to write more on my own blog…I tend to go in fits and spurts. I haven't had a problem with Blogger yet but I don't do anything beyond the basic Blogger settings…they only change I made was upgrading to the new version of their software, which wasn't that big of a deal even though I was dreading it. Looking forward to seeing your new writing (and pictures!)
Yeah, if you use their hosting, you're unaffected :) I'm one of a very very very very tiny portion of Blogger users (which is why they're discontinuing the service).
Professional, eh? I guess I wrote that way because I want to get back into the habit of writing thoughtful, authoritative posts. Occasionally I get to reading my archives and am astonished at how prolific I once was. (Of course, back then I either worked part time or didn't have a job at all…)