Housekeeping Notes
Ed Note from 2023: This is all irrelevant now, I’m back on Blot.
Over the last few days, I moved the back end of my blog over to a different platform. Moving all the posts turned out to be quite more of a manual process than expected. It gave me an opportunity to read through e v e r y t h i n g in my archives, which was sometimes a good thing, and sometimes not so much.
Anyway, everything is now here, nice and tidy on the blog subdomain. I keep going back and forth as to whether I prefer the blog to be the top level domain, or to have a landing page. But as the landing page keeps everything nice and neat, I’ve “landed” there for now. Ha ha. Jokes.
A few notes about why I made the transition away from Blot.im, because as my host of the last few years they were really wonderful. Their customer service was excellent, and they did make the initial transition away from Tumblr really easy. But, in terms of my own style of blogging, there were a few flaws:
The template system. For me, it never worked 100% the way I wanted it to. I tried to devote time to learning the way moustache themes work, but there were always some quirks/tweaks I couldn’t get working, and I couldn’t figure out why.
Tagging. The tagging was never intuitive to me, particularly when I was just posting an image on its own, I couldn’t actually figure out how to add tags at all.
Hosting via Dropbox. It actually WORKED flawlessly, in terms of the Blot-Dropbox integration, but I kept worrying about running out of Dropbox space, and Dropbox storage plans are too pricey for my personal blog which is updated only occasionally.
Updating via Markdown. I found a few good markdown editors, but creating a post using a markdown editor, figuring out how to insert an image (hosted elsewhere) into a post, and then formatting etc… it was all just slightly less easy than I want. Particularly because my main style of blogging never really moved away from the Tumblr style (ie, share content I didn’t make, attribute it to the place I found it). Quick posts just don’t happen easily when you have to copy an image, upload it to an image host, insert it using a markdown editor, and then drop that file into Dropbox. We’re talking a matter of minutes, but I was used to reblogging in seconds on Tumblr, and I missed that ease.
I’m using Postach.io now as my hosting platform, and it uses Evernote as its base. So far it is as easy as running a blog on Tumblr was. There are some things it lacks (like an Archive page?) but so far the pluses outweigh the minuses. And now that everything is all in one place (again), I think it’ll be smooth sailing from here.
UPDATE: I’ve moved to Notion.so.
As a bonus to this process, several things which were formatted terribly the last few years were fixed. A lot of dead links probably remain, but I did try to flag that links were dead where I saw them. I did not import a few things that had lived on my blog before - like some crossposts from twitter, or posts that were simply “listening to on Spotify”. There was a point in time where I stopped blogging all together, so all of my content just came from ifttt.com triggers dragging in my content from elsewhere. When it wasn’t meaningful as a post on its own, I did not import it (for example, there is no use hosting this post forever I think). So essentially, anything that lives here now was actually content I created (or purposefully reblogged) and not just content I let a robot drag over for me in the 2010s .
Speaking of 2010 - that was a BANNER year for me blogging. I had 261 posts that year, more than any other year. And then a STEEP drop off in 2015, when I stopped using Tumblr as much. Interesting, although probably only to me.
Now, to figure out how to export my Twitter, and where to put it.