tl;dr: This blog will be following its sibling blog and transitioning to my personal site, blog.fixermark.com.
Changing to another blog engine
Effective today, new posts will be showing up at blog.fixermark.com instead of here. Blogger has been an excellent home for several years, but I've decided to shift my writing to my own server to simplify several things. Some details follow.
Why?
Several reasons, but the main ones are control and convenience. I've set up a pretty clean blog-authoring architecture behind the scenes using Hugo, and the most effort-intensive part next to "actually writing a blog post" is "reformatting the Hugo output to match to Blogger's requirements." Self-hosting just makes it easier to maintain the blog.
(... See that break in the background color there? The place where light cream gradient discontinuously jumps into flat orange? That's just a bug in the style of the theme Google provided. Can I fix it? Maybe. How? Don't know. On Hugo, I just set the background to a back-and-forth gradient and I'm happy).
Do you hate Google now?
Definitely not, in fact, I'm giving up several convenient features by going to self-hosting:
- The analytics here are top-notch, and the analytics I get on my own blog are far, far lower-resolution. I've chosen not to attach Google Analytics to my new blog as it brings concern for some readers, so such lack of resolution is to be expected.
- Google is very, ahem, generous with indexing blog posts on its own service into its index. In contrast, my personal blog has been off Blogger for several months now and has yet to show up in any search indices.
- Blogger's web interface works great. My new blog requires editing text files and uploading the results to a server.
- The new blog is totally statically-generated, so comments and timed publishing have to be done by me manually now. In contrast, this post went up automatically at the time I set it to.
All of that said: the driving factor to leaving is still UI convenience. Blogger's UI hasn't really evolved in ages, and for technical writing in particular it has some pretty severe friction points that I will not miss.
What of all the content that's already here?
Nothing will be deleted from this blog, because that would mess up way too many permalinks (and I'm not planning to put the effort in to clone all the articles here to the new site). You should be able to find everything here indefinitely.
So that's that then. Thanks for being my home for awhile Blogger; you did good work. But I'm hoping people enjoy the new blog, where I've already put up an article about building a plugin for the FIRST Robotics "Shuffleboard" dashboard program. Hope to see you there!
