Moving to Blogger

I have decided to move the contents of this blog from self-hosted Drupal to Blogger. I like Drupal, but Blogger is so much easier to manage. I am, of course, losing the freedom to make alterations and customizations as I fit, but I have never done that in the several years the blog has been live. Also, I am getting a little fed up with the blog spam. I was getting multiple spam attempts every day and a few were squeaking through the antispam measures (mostly just filtering and a captcha). Blogger seems to keep that more at bay.


And the pages serve up much faster, though that is more related to the quality of GoDaddy's hosting than to anything about Drupal.

The transfer was only slightly tedious—I had to transfer the posts one by one, but my blog doesn't have too many posts so it was not particularly onerous. I just copied the text for each and fixed the formatting. In some cases I copied the HTML source for the post and needed to do very little to clean it up. Blogger lets me backdate the entry to match the old blog (just set the schedule, which is the same thing that lets you release items in the future). I just copied the title, set the labels in Blogger to match my tags from Drupal, and all was well. I had no comments on the blog (other than spam) so I didn't have to figure out what to do with those.

My only complaint with Blogger is that in the formatting options there is no button for a code block. I have to enter the code tags manually in the HTML version. This is no worse than Drupal was, but I would have expected Google have this covered.

As for competing blog platforms, I don't have any huge opinions. I couldn't find any major feature differences among the big blog hosts that made a difference to me. I am already well sucked into the Google world, and Blogger integrates into that pretty well.

Older links to individual blog posts will no longer be working...I don't have the same URL structure on Blogger that I set up on Drupal, so there is no real reason to try and match the link names to make them work. And I have never seen any evidence that anyone else is linking here anyway. Perhaps being on Blogger will raise the visibility of the blog, though I have never created this to build a readership...it has really just been an attempt to share back the kind of knowledge that I always find helpful when I come across it on other people's blogs. That's not to say I will not vainly check the viewing stats once in a while...