Changes Coming Here
02/04/2010
A few days ago I logged in to my account at HaloScan, the company that provides the comment service I use here, and was greeted with the announcement that it is shutting down the HaloScan service and replacing it with a new one. February 10 (next Wednesday) is the day HaloScan dies, so I have to make the switch soon. I’m going to try to do it this weekend. I don’t know what to expect. I haven’t had a chance even to read over the information about the new service, so I don’t know if it will be an improvement or otherwise.
Then yesterday I got an email from Blogger saying that they are going to discontinue FTP publishing. This is a very big deal for this blog, bigger than the commenting change (assuming the new comment service works reasonably well). It means that sometime between now and roughly mid-March the blog is going to move. It will definitely move physically, most likely to a Blogspot server. And it may have a new address. One way or another there will still be a lightondarkwater.com, and you’ll be able to get to the blog from there. But it probably won’t be “/blog.” And I’m pretty sure that the URLs of all the blog posts will change, breaking bookmarks and links from other sites.
If you aren’t interested in any further technical explanation, you can stop reading now.
Pause.
Ok, since you’re interested, here’s the story: back in 2004 I decided to put some of my writings on the web, not in a blog, but at a conventional site. So I registered the domain name lightondarkwater.com and bought a low-priced hosting plan from GoDaddy.com, and learned enough HTML and CSS to put up simple pages. The Sunday Night Journal was published this way for the first couple of years.
Sometime in 2006—around June, I think—I decided that it would be a lot easier to maintain the SNJ as a blog. And I also wanted to be able to post casual things. But I wanted the blog to be part of my existing site. I found that although most Blogger blogs are hosted at Blogger’s domain, blogspot.com (hence most Blogger blogs are “blogname.blogspot.com”), they gave one the option of using their software but publishing the blog elsewhere, via FTP (a program that copies files from one place to another on the network). So I created a Blogger blog and published it to www.lightondarkwater.com/blog.
I discovered immediately that I had a problem with comments. Blogger provides its own commenting facility, but it publishes comments only to the Blogspot servers. This meant that a Blogger comment on my site would not actually appear on the site until I re-published the blog. Obviously this wasn’t going to be acceptable—there would be intervals of hours between remarks in a conversation, which of course meant there would be no conversations.
So I used HaloScan, which gives one the option of associating comments with any of the popular blogging services. The comments reside on their servers, not at lightondarkwater.com, which only contains links to them. When you read or post a comment here, you’re talking to haloscan.com.
Now Google (owner of Blogger) has decided that support for FTP publishing is costing them too much (and I can see why it would be a headache) for the small number of blogs being maintained that way. I haven’t yet read their detailed description of the options available to me now. I can switch the blog to lightondarkwater.blogspot.com, but then it’s no longer part of the main site. I can move the lightondarkwater.com domain name to Blogger, so that the blog would be at www.lightondarkwater.com. But what about my other stuff? A lot of it is really not suitable for blog posts; for one thing, the chronological organization is not meaningful. I could switch to WordPress, which supports non-blog pages. I’m not sure if they support user domains or not.
Anyway...this is a huge hassle, and I only have a month or so to decide what I’m going to do and start doing it. At some point my stuff is likely to be offline for a day or so. I’ll let you know when the change is closer.
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