I’ve been trying to get out of here … I mean from my current blog space. For some time now, I’ve had dreams for a slicker site. Something less dusty and dated. Something shinier, more contemporary, more with it, whatever the moment’s with it is. The thought of moving hundreds of posts, along with nearly as many images from TypePad to a self-hosted site with sophisticated bells and whistles has been scurrying around in the back of my web brain like a rodent getting fatter every time someone threw me a morsel of hope of how easy this process can be.
Well yes, I remember how easy it was to set up my own sites – including my own blogging platform back in the early days of such undertakings when enthusiasm was the high-grade fuel that kept me devouring new developments in technology. Easy, but come to think of it, in a way that is mostly so in retrospect.
So far, I have spent the better part of the last few days trying to set up a new site with a new domain. As I navigate through the back alleys of the hosting site’s file structures, trying to remember old stuff through the overlay of the more user-friendly panels and ftp utilities and easy-as-pie installers and plugins and … well, I am feeling overwhelmed. And I already "broke" my setup a few times. So now I am feeling very old, as if my brain had been drained of the capacity to geek out on the first few rounds of the last two decades of the next new thing that came along.
I just want to write. It’s what I like to do and it’s what I can still do, regardless of what next new thing sweeps in on the wings of progress with the promise of altering my future beyond the wildest imagination – and usually for only the good. Of course.
But TypePad, with its origins older than WordPress, makes this blogging business difficult these days. These days, this platform seems a little creaky and haunted by the ghosts of what was. Getting out of here is a huge hassle, as TypePad holds the images I upload hostage somewhere inaccessible to me and renamed in a crazy random fashion. It’s a bit like the Hotel California of The Eagles, you know, the place where you can check out any time, but never leave….
Anyway, move I will, even if I have to leave behind the content and the pictures. I’ve already lost my original blog to the wayback machine. In this, the story of my blog life will mirror the periodic erasures in my life brought on by the habits of emigration.
Oh well….
