My first post on this blog was on October 18, 2009. Since then I have published 216 posts, mostly on stories, story work, and complexity.
Over the past few years, I have been thinking that since hardly anyone is using RSS readers anymore, and since I need to maintain a presence in people’s minds (so that once in a while somebody might pay me to do something for them), I should transition the blog to an email newsletter.
Blogger (where I have had my blog all along) has never supported email newsletters, at least not by itself. Also, I’ve always been concerned that Google might drop Blogger and I’d have to find a new home for the blog in a hurry. So I decided to move the blog to WordPress.
What I’ve been doing (moving the blog)
I exported the blog and imported it into WordPress using a plugin. Unfortunately, the process did not go well. Possibly because the posts were written over a period of 17 years, I ended up with a lot of garbled posts. Line endings were inserted randomly and with a variety of html tags. Headings were sometimes headings and sometimes paragraphs. Worst, every image link pointed to the wrong location. It was a mess.
I tried a few search-and-replace fixes, but I couldn’t find a single solution that would fix every problem. So I decided to go over each post by hand. I had wanted to make some edits anyway. I’ve been doing that for the past few weeks, as a sort of vacation holiday. It has been quite an interesting trip down memory lane!
While I skimmed and fixed my blog posts, I also did a few other things:
- I removed 20-30 pieces of writing that are now in one of my books. Some of my earliest posts (like most of the original “eight observations”) I have kept as they were (with a note) because the versions in the books are shorter and leave out some of my early thinking. But I removed all of the writing that is substantially similar to the writing in a book (not the posts, just the content, so the links still work).
- I added updating notes to some posts, especially to ones in which I said I planned to do something, in case people blunder across them and wonder what happened to my plans.
- I reorganized the posts into fewer and better categories (which are themselves clustered into three over-arching themes: people, projects, and topics). I set up a simple menu where you can easily see all of the posts for a particular project or topic.
- I tried out a million WordPress themes, found myself attracted to the most “minimal” ones, and ended up choosing the most minimal one I could find (it’s called Sten). Now there’s no distracting sidebar, and there are no more featured images. It’s just words. Call me old, but I’m tired of the thumbnailing of the internet, as if we are all children who need picture-books to read.
- I used a broken-link checker plugin to find out that there are 160 broken links on the blog. I haven’t fixed very many yet, but I will fix them all, one by one, when I need a break from doing other things.
What I have lost along the way (your comments)
When I was about halfway through the process of going though my old blog posts, I suddenly realized that none of the blog’s comments had been imported. I had assumed they were and hadn’t checked.
I thought a lot about what to do about this. I think there is a way to fix the problem (by messing with the WordPress database). But it doesn’t seem worth the effort. There were plenty of comments at the start of the blog, but since around 2016, there have been only a few comments per year. I doubt anyone who wrote a comment a decade ago cares if I spend days figuring out how to show it to everyone. So I decided to let the comments go. I do have a file with every comment in it. So if you made a comment here a long time ago, and you want a copy of it, ask me and I’ll find it for you.
Surprisingly, the very last post I made on Blogger got two comments. I have copied those over by hand.
Going forward, after much thought, I have decided to disable comments on the blog. I don’t want to do this, but the spam-to-real-comment ratio is huge, and new spam comments started coming almost immediately after I switched over the domain name. WordPress just gets a lot more spam than Blogger. Akismet (the WordPress plugin most people use to get rid of spam) is $10 a month for commercial use (which this would be). That means that if people comment as much as they have been doing, I will be paying $20-30 for each non-spam comment. That’s insane. I’m not going to do that.
So from now on, if you read one of my blog posts and want to say something to me about it, send me an email, and we’ll talk about it. I think I might like that better anyway.
What comes next (a mailing list)
My next task is to set up a mailing list to tell interested people about new blog posts. I’ve decided to do this in a sort of quintuple-opt-in way, like this:
- When you click the “Subscribe” button (that will soon appear on the blog), you will be able to add your email to a list that I will only use to tell you about new blog posts.
- When I publish a blog post, because you are on my list, you will get an email about it. But the email will not be the blog post. It will be a brief summary of what the blog post is about, plus a link to the post. When you get the email, you will have four options:
- You can auto-filter the email into a folder, then check the folder when you feel like it.
- You can read the email’s subject line and not open the email.
- You can open the email, read the summary, and not click on the link.
- You can open the email, click the link, and read the blog post.
I think this approach is a minimally intrusive way to “get the word out” about new posts. Due credit, by the way: I didn’t think of the summary-and-link idea. That came from my husband. I get a lot of ideas from him, and from my son.
I still plan to mention new blog posts on LinkedIn occasionally, but it will be less often than before. I find LinkedIn a loud and jostling place to be, and I’d like to go there less often. Call me old, but I have grown weary of the outrage machines, and I’d like to tell people about things in a quieter way.
My long-term plan (more tips, ideas, explorations)
I would like to start writing new posts every few weeks with the sorts of tips and ideas I’ve always posted here. I have started a new spreadsheet of topics (like I had back in the day). As before, I will draw partly from advice I am giving to people in emails and calls (discreetly and anonymously) when I think other people might also benefit from similar advice.
I will also post updates on my various continuing projects. For example, if I do find time to work on At Home with Stories again, I think people might like to read some of the thoughts I have about it as I go.
My goal for this blog will always be the same as it was when I started it: to help ideas get out of my head and into the right heads to do some good for the world. And, of course, to make some money, so I can keep finding ideas and helping them move around.