Switching Blog Platforms
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://mguhlin.wordpress.com. The backup is completely free. And, I'm thrilled at the look of it.
See what it looks like at https://mguhlin.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