In the next couple of weeks I'll be moving my blog to from Blogger to WordPress. The primary reason is that I host my blog on my webserver, not Google's (which owns Blogger, in case you didn't know) and therefore, have needed to publish via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

Google has decided, for fairly sound reasons for them, to discontinue FTP as a means of publishing to Blogger. This means that to stay on the Blogger platform, I would need to port my blog to blogspot.com or create a subdomain on my server which would, in reality, be hosted on a Google server rather than my server.

I have a personal bias against hosting anything on a server that does not belong to me. This is driven by my years ago experience with a service called X-Drive which allowed you to use their servers to store files. Well, X-Drive did some upgrades that borked up my files -- which were daily copies of my current WIP. Not so fun, but I worked around that. And then they went out of business. With no notice, all my file archives were gone. GONE.

Never again, I said.

Some of you may recall Microsoft Music. They promised you'd be able to access your music forever. Microsoft's scheme was that your music would not play unless it could be validated against their server. I was on dial up at the time and only bought 1 song, after which I had to sadly accept that dial up was going to prevent me from downloading anything ever. Well, guess what? Microsoft Music shut down and everyone who bought music from them would now be unable to play their music. There was a bit of an uproar and eventually, MS agreed to leave those servers on. Dunno if they still are.

There are more stories like that to be found. Third party storage is ALWAYS a risk. You don't own their servers, and companies, imho I'm sorry to confess, will always elect to screw their customers if there's something in it for them. Which is why I elected to host my blog on my website. This allowed me to backup and manage my own blog, including downloading to my own computer.

As I was mulling over the ramifications of no FTP publishing for Blogger, Blogger went and deleted the content of several music blogs hosted with them. Without notice to the bloggers. Because, supposedly, these blogs had pirated music. Only they didn't. Most of them, actually had legal demos given to them by the music companies. But their posts were gone. Not just the music, but the posts.

Blogger's all sorry now, but too late, if you ask me. The content's gone and not recoverable, as I understand it.

I blog about books sometimes. Sometimes I'll post a snippet of text, and quite often a cover. If my blog was hosted with Google, what happens when someone decides that blogging about books is copyright infringement?

So anyhoo, that's why I'm finally doing what I've been thinking about for ages; Getting off Blogger and moving to WordPress, which is installed on my web server. There's no need to host any part of my domain someplace other than my web server. And Google can't go deleting my stuff because they can.

My webhost has already ported my website to a server that supports the most recent versions of the software I need. I'm just waiting for my web designer to do the WordPress template for me. Once that happens, the blogger blog will become archives and my blog will move, seamlessly, I expect, to the WordPress platform.

I'm looking forward to doing some of the neat stuff WordPress allows that my Blogger solution doesn't.

Wish me luck!

Labels: Blogging

Visit my blog post over at Grand Central Cafe and find out how you could win a signed copy of My Wicked Enemy.

Labels: Blogging, contest, shamless promotion

Today I blogged over at the Grand Central Cafe blog. Here's a direct link to my post. Cookies and Twitter. Yeah, I probably made a fool of myself. Not the first time!

Labels: Blogging, Grand Central Cafe