Apr 28, 2010

Chipmunk warning: this blog may self-destruct

I'm not sure what's going to happen to this blog on Saturday.

For a while now, a message warning me that 'FTP publishing will be no longer available after 01 May 2010' has been screaming from my blog main page.

Without getting too technical, I seem to have no way of switching off FTP publishing. Blogger's 'migration tool' (which sounds like a massive catapult for geese in the autumn) doesn't work. I've contacted their support service, but so far their responses have been (a) blank reply, (b) "we're looking into it" and (c) blank reply.

So several things may happen to this blog on Saturday. It may possibly explode, go into overdrive, wither, carry on as normal or perform the musical equivalent of one of the following:

- speed up until everything becomes a blur as in Moby's Thousand (still technically the fastest song ever);

- become pretentious, overblown and annoying like The Darkness / Queen / the Glee cast (oh come on, you have to admit the sheen has worn off);

- turn into Chipmunk.

If I stop posting from this weekend, I would recommend you keep an eye on my tweets for futher news. You could even follow me, because if you like the crap here, then there's a lot more crap there.

5 comments:

Richard Holden said...

Go Wordpress!

Fat Roland said...

You're right. Do you self-host? Who with? How does it work? Tell all.

Richard Holden said...

Personally, I self host (with http://refer.asmallorange.com/15135). It's dead easy to set up, as most hosts have an automatic Wordpress install script included. I pay only about £12 a year, but it'd probably cost you more as you get more traffic and have more content so would have to go up to the next level of pricing.

I'd just give a wordpress.com hosted blog a go first and see what you think, and whether your old stuff imports properly, etc. You get a [whatever].wordpress.com address for free, so you could try that without committing to anything. You can choose your own domain for a small price after that, so it wouldn't be too hard for you to transfer fatroland.com to it if you decided that's what you wanted in the end.

It'd probably be cheaper and easier than self-hosting, but you can't tweak Wordpress as much, so if you find it's too limiting in terms of themes/plugins etc. you could always self-host.

Dawnriser said...

I migrated my Blogger blogs without a problem - and some of them were hosted on servers I no longer have access to! I was astonished that Blogger seemed to have kept a copy of all my blogs somewhere in Google's inner recesses.

PS I now use Wordpress for all my active blogs - the Blogger one's were last updated in 2007.

Fat Roland said...

Thanks both for your thoughts. I think I'll try and import this blog into Wordpress.com and see if it stays in one piece. I think that tends to mess up your Google hits, though, and that's a significant enough part of my traffic to be a problem. Maybe I'll just rest this one and start a new one - but it seems a shame to lose my 500+ artist tags!

Decisions, decisions. Come on, brain, work harder!