Update: I’ve since decided to move back to WordPress. After using Blogger for a couple of weeks I realised that, even though there were some definite advantages, the flexibility and control I get when I host my own blog is difficult to match with Blogger. The statistics, integration with Google+ and responsive default theme were great, but ultimately not enough to keep me there. I will continue posting here and will move the few posts I made there to this domain.
I’ve been playing around with the idea of moving from WordPress to Blogger for a few weeks now, and have finally decided to take the plunge. Initially I was reluctant because of the problems with importing a full blog into Blogger and I didn’t want to leave behind everything that I’ve gathered here over the past few years. But, the more I thought about it the more I realised that I’m OK with the ephemeral nature of life online and that archiving everything I do on the web isn’t as important to me as it once was. Once I figured that out, the decision was simple. Here are a few reasons that I’ve gone over to Blogger:
- I felt like I needed a new start, considering that I’m coming to the end of my PhD, and a new blog seemed like a good place to begin.
- I’m tired of a self-hosted blog, with all the maintenance and update responsibilities, and it was a choice between wordpress.com and Blogger.
- My WordPress installation has become bloated after a few years, and I don’t feel like trying to pare it down.
- A change is as good as a holiday. I’m pretty well acquainted with WordPress after a few years of heavy use, and I wanted to try something new.
- The new Blogger UI is dead simple to use.
- The default responsive (dynamic) theme in Blogger is elegant and will display beautifully no matter what device is used to view it.
- Finally, and probably most importantly, I use a lot of Google services and products and it seemed to make sense to move my blog to a Google platform as well. Many won’t like it, but I think that the integration with Google+ is great and I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges in the next few years.
If you’re interested in following what I’m interested in, you can find me at http://usr-space.blogspot.com/. I’ll leave this blog up and running until someone smarter than me figures out a way to import a big WordPress blog into Blogger. Until that happens, I might go through my older posts and move some of the ones I like into the new blog. Or not.