The expurgated version

Congratulations, you're enjoying the new expurgated version of my blog.

My previous blog service provider is leaving the business, so I needed to find a new provider and migrate my old posts.

By the way, my thanks to Alan and Ceri at Blog-City, which has been a great home for the last 8 years.

It didn't take long in my evaluation of new blogging services to discover two glaring issues with migration:

• Permalinks aren't permalinks.  More precisely, the new providers I was looking at wouldn't let me duplicate the old permalinks as-is because they seem to insist on a specific format.  So it seems that if anyone has saved a link to one of my posts, that link will now break. I'm guessing that will include Google Search, so what, I lose my accumulated pagerank because my service provider closes their doors?
• There was no easy way to migrate my posts.  All the services provide some kind of export, and re-import back into their service.  Some also support migration from certain other large players - for example, it seems as if one can switch between Blogger and Wordpress in either direction.  However, no-one seems willing to import the lingua franca of blog content, RSS. Probably some deliberate decision to discourage blog theft or something.

Which is where the expurgated version of my new blog comes from.  I spent a bunch of time over the past few days migrating old posts by hand, and fixing broken 'permalinks' between some of my posts.  I won't be migrating everything ... there were a bunch that aren't very interesting any more, like those advertising a Spikesource event. Hmmm. I guess I was pouring free beer, that makes it interesting. :)

Anyway, enjoy the ramblings of a marketing oddity and legal (well, frequently) alien. Mark II.