Decision Time

If you’ve been following my blog, you will know that I originally started it on Windows Live Spaces over five years ago. Then in June this year, Microsoft suddenly switched off some features in Windows Live Spaces without warning, and I decided to jump ship to another blogging platform.

As far as I was concerned, there were two primary contenders for my future blogging platform: Blogger and WordPress. In the end, I decided to go with Blogger, primarily because there I could use a couple of widgets that I rather liked (the widgets use Javascript, which isn’t permitted on WordPress.com).

Then a couple of months after I had made the decision, Microsoft eventually decided to come clean and announced that they would be pulling the plug on Windows Live Spaces. Fortunately, they also announced a migration path that would enable users to preserve their existing blog content by moving it over to the replacement blogging platform. Unfortunately, this replacement platform was WordPress, rather than Blogger.

So I found myself in the situation where all my historical blog content was now sitting on the WordPress platform, while I was blogging new content on the Blogger platform. I also found myself duplicating many of the new entries on WordPress, In addition, in the past few months I have been able to compare the statistics features of both platforms directly, and, currently at least, WordPress is far superior to Blogger in this respect.

This straddling of two platforms does not strike me as particularly elegant. So I have two options:

1. Stop using Blogger, and continue to build my blog on WordPress
2. Stop using WordPress, and manually migrate all my old posts over to Blogger.

Option (1) means that I lose my dynamic LibraryThing widget that displays a rolling selection of books from my library (see image 1) and instead have a static, textual selection that only gets refreshed when the whole web page is refreshed (image 2). On the plus side, I get access to a better statistics feature that keeps me informed as to how my blog is being read.                               

Image 1

Image 2

Option (2) means that I get to keep my LibraryThing eye-candy. But on the downside, the blog statistics are not very useful, and there will also be a large amount of work to migrate five years of past entries over to Blogger before I switch off the WordPress blog.

After weighing up the pros and cons, I think, on balance, that the best way forward is to stop using Blogger, and concentrate on just using WordPress from this point on.

So, what was called my “Old” Blog on WordPress now gets renamed to be just “Geoff Coupe’s Blog”; and what was my “New” blog on Blogger now gets frozen and will no longer be added to.

You are now on the current blog where both the historical and current content is to be found…