After several hours monkeying with assorted python scripts and megabytes of XML a few weeks ago, I succeeded in pulling the full archive of all the blog posts I had ever written into Blogger, along with several thousand of the comments. There were a few things Blogger didn’t do too well, but overall I was happy to have settled on a stable platform to house my writing going forwards. Blogger had been around for years, had never changed much, and now had the backing of Google. I trusted them.
I trusted them until lunchtime today, when I visited the blog to read a comment, and noticed the URL had changed.
After a little searching, reading, and following links, I discovered what had happened. Google are now re-directing all Blogger blogs to top level domains related to the location the visitor is visiting from. If you visit from the UK, you will see “.co.uk”, Australia “.au”, and so on. The reason is behind it is pretty obvious; when Google receive a takedown notice from a commercial entity in a given region, they can down the blog only within the appropriate region. It’s a pretty clever idea. There’s a huge problem though.
Every search engine will see each of your posts for every top level domain. Therefore your posts appear tens of times each. This will dilute the valuation of the posts, and wreck organic search traffic.
Quite apart from the search issue, it was a timely reminder that while it’s easierto hand off governance of your writing to a third party,there is nothing to stop them changing the platform under you - just as Google did this morning.
My evening therefore consisted of a reversal of my arrival at blogger. After throwing Python at the XML export from Blogger, and staging the upload of 9 years worth of posts to avoid memory caps, I’m back at my own installation of WordPress.
If I everthink about changing platforms again, please shout at me.
Oh, in other news, I read today that Posterous has been bought by Twitter, and is essentially being left to rot. It makes me sad - Posterous was never the best engineered blogging platform, but it had some great ideas. Perhaps it serves as another reminder about the virtues of owning the platform you post on…