One of the main reasons I chose to go with Blogger as an enduring solution for the writing I share online was the existence of my old posts - stretching back to 2003. Or so I thought.
While digging through old posts a few days ago, I discovered that the record isn’t quite as good as I thought; at some point along the way - probably a couple of years ago - a lot of the posts have been truncated; chopped to their first few sentences in many cases. The strange thing is, I have the full text of those missing posts squirrelled away in Google Drive in markdown format, so you would think that resurrecting them would be a simple question of migrating them back to the blog… except you would be wrong. That will require development work - effort. Ah yes… that “effort” word again.
So. It turns out a lot of the Blogger archive is mangled up… which raises the question “why bother with it then?”. Good question.
For a few moments this evening I considered the “damn it all” option of just settling for Tumblr, and putting up with it’s many and varied annoyances. But then the rational part of my brain kicked in, and thought “who do you trust more - Google, or Tumblr?”. There’s no comparison. One of the platforms never goes down. One of the platforms lets you export everything you have done easily. That platform is not Tumblr.
So… after going around the houses in my head once again, I am carrying on exactly as before - writing at Blogger WordPress, and cross-posting as links into Tumblr - all of which makes this post almost entirely useless… I just wasted five minutes of your life, if you bothered reading this far. I would apologise, but it’s pretty amusing really…