Migrating blog away from Blogger

I have finally migrated my blog away from Blogger. It has been long time comming but the outcome is good.

Blogger have hosted my blog since day 1 untill now (2019). First at flurdy.blogspot.com then for most of the time at blog.flurdy.com. And it has for most part been a great provider over the years.

Annoyances

But there has been a few things that has annoyed me with Blogger:

• Crap template
• Additional garbage
• Comment spam
• WYSIWYG editing

Crap Templates

The included templates were ok but have not aged gracefully. The content column is very narrow making most of the blog posts harder to read.

Additional garbage

The blog pages are filled with lots of scripts and trackers that I do not need.

Comment spam

There have been over the years some really usefull comments. And I have added comments to follow up some of the posts. But the last few years a good comment is rare. And 99% is spam.

WYSIWYG editing

The default editor is WYSIWYG, and is quite powerful. But I just want raw HTML and in control of the content. The HTML output Blogger creates is complete trash.

I did for a while draft the blog posts in Google Docs and copy pasted the final content across. But that was messy.

Risk

Killed by Google

The major reason for migrating away from Blogger is the risk posed by Google hosting it.

Google is in general a good company. The “Don’t be evil” mantra may not be quite true anymore but I do believe the company and especially its staff have mostly good intentions.

But they are a heavily automated company, all the interactions you will have with them will be in an automated away. Or as an automated response to something else.

This means on a whim you can have your Blogger account suspended or deleted without much chance of stopping it or even finding out why. Or worse you entire Google account. Before you know it your blog, photos, email, documents, contacts etc could be gone.

I, as many, did act like Niemöller’s poem (“First they came for…”) thinking that would not happen to me then I had an Adwords account of mine suspended with no method of finding out why nor any method to restore it.

Which encouraged (spooked) me to continue my process of de-googling myself and I have now moved my blog away from Blogger (and Google).

Blog alternatives

So where is my blog now? There are a many many blog hosting alternatives. Including:

• Wordpress
• Medium
• Jekyll

Wordpress

Wordpress hosted or self hosted probably is the most popular blog destination in the world. But Wordpress and PHP is so full of security holes I would not consider it. And I did not need any online real-time editing tools.

Medium

Popular amongst friends and peers is Medium. But I did not want another hosted solution, and not under another company’s domain.

Jekyll

A static site generated and run with Jekyll ticked all the boxes for me. In my next blog I can detail quickly how I migrated from Blogger and set up my blog with Jekyll.