Since 2009, this personal blog of mine has run on Blogger, a platform owned by Google. Over the years, it had become obvious that Blogger wasn’t a priority for the folks in Mountain View. Concerned about the inevitability of the platform being shut down I decided to migrate away from it. I considered multiple options and landed on WordPress, which I was already familiar with and which is open source. (WordPress is also a company that offers paid services such as hosting, and also supports the open source software.)
Migration of the blog turned out to be a bigger task than I had thought for a variety of reasons. There were many issues that I needed to deal with and, having started the migration and overhaul in 2019, it took until now to complete.
There were hundreds of broken or redirected links to address. It’s not that surprising that decade-old links to event registration pages were gone, but discovering articles that were only a few years old have vanished was unexpected. It felt like I was doing a restoration, always making decisions about how to handle each broken link. Many I simply removed. For others I found new links to use instead.
The biggest issue was discovering multiple eras of questionable Blogger HTML to sanitize. Plentiful nested DIV elements were only a small part of that mess. In the end, the posts are stripped down and clean, ready for new eyes to read them (and new web browsers to interpret the HTML).
I also spent time refurbishing the images. Many of them had originally been posted in smaller sizes than today’s web users might expect. As most photos were my own, I went back to the originals in many cases and added upgraded versions to the blog.
Happily, I had always run the blog on my own domain name, though Blogger-style URLs needed to be updated with WordPress URLs and appropriate re-directs. That was relatively easy compared with other work.
Finally, I added a few pieces that I had neglected to cross-post over the last few years. They had been written originally for the Zeitspace blog or the Fluxible blog. Collecting them together here makes for a more representative picture of what I’ve been up to.
I’m sure there will be issues that emerge that I’ve missed, and there are things that I’m still working on in the background. But it feels good to have this done.