I need
better supervision
I’ve just renewed this year’s subscription to my Wordpress blog, Always Another Chapter, and I was thinking. I’ve never really clicked with Wordpress, and I’ve been using that blog since 2018, so I’m unlikely to start now. On the other hand, I’ve been posting on Blogger for my mum/personal blog since 2012, and I’m quite comfortable there. I think that I’ll be able to get adverts on there, as I managed to add them accidentally to my mum blog, so that’s a plus. And it’s free! Of course, I could just switch to the free version of Wordpress without using the company that help with domain names and support, but I still like Blogger, so Blogger it is.
I’ve
decided that I’ll be posting on my writing blog on Wordpress until the end of
October. I always like to do something spooky in the run up to Halloween and
I’ve already started scheduling some posts, so I’m keeping going until then.
After that, I’ll move everything over to Blogger, leaving a redirect notice on
the Wordpress blog until the subscription runs out. That’s the easy,
on-the-surface stuff. It doesn’t sound so bad, just switching across to a
different platform. If only it was that simple.
The
main reason that I renewed the subscription this time is because I would lose a
lot of work if I lost the site. I’ve already lost a few pieces because I’ve
posted directly onto other people’s sites and then lost the work when those
sites went down, and I’m sure that there’s a few pieces in the aether from when
I tried with other blogging platforms, so I feel quite attached to the bits
that I’ve managed to hold onto. It’s not entirely at the mercy of my blog,
though, as I automatically save to the Cloud, and while my laptop is chaotic
and I can’t find a thing, I’ve recently gained access to an elderly PC and I’ve
managed to keep things in better order on there.
And a great representation of the chaos of my laptop’s filing system
However, I really can’t find anything on my laptop, and my PC is so elderly that it is physically unable to run Windows 11. In fact, the PC crashed two paragraphs ago and I had to do a hard reboot and give thanks for the automatic save function. I’m not sure that I can be trusted to keep a USB drive safe, but I’m going to have to invest in a couple I think, just to keep the work safe. I have two potential fallbacks. One method is to convert as many posts as is feasible into book form, so goodness only knows where I’ll go from there. After all, I’ve not had stellar success with the posts for the White Hart. The other is to preserve stuff on my blog. My Wordpress site has functioned as storage over the years, and there are about 360 draft entries that function as a trail of what I’ve worked on and when. If I stop paying my subscription then I lose all those pieces. I’m going to have to transfer all those posts over to Blogger. What fun - not!
So I
skimmed over all 598 posts, including drafts, on my Wordpress blog, which was
more fun than it sounds as I got to dip into a few stories that I’d forgotten,
and that I absolutely want to tidy up and show off again. I made some wildly
optimistic notes about what I could potentially do with a few bits, and then I
had a rummage through some bits on Blogger. Many years ago, I posted fiction on
Blogger under the same banner, Always Another Chapter, and that site is
still there. Some posts from there ended up on the Wordpress site and others
have drifted into obscurity. I had a quick rummage through the 164 posts on
there as well, and there are a couple of duplicated posts.
But when faced with overwhelming administrative odds, the first thing to do is to make a list, and I have just shy of 100 posts to transfer between Wordpress and Blogger not including all the posts for Invitation Accepted, Under Dark Hills, Dark Picture and The Guest. Posts for the White Hart and Kane are already elsewhere, and I’m not too worried about those, at least for now. I suspect that I’ve quite a few posts missing from those as well, but I’ll see how it goes. I can see many more lists looming in my future.
So because I’m my own worst enemy, I’m now going to be playing around with just shy of six hundred posts and making sure that I don’t lose anything, while still trying to do all the other stuff that I want to do. But I hope that it’s worth it and allows me to move forward with a better idea of what’s going on, and a free platform to play on. And that can’t be bad.
