Moved from Google’s Blogger!
September 9th, 2007Well, I’ve finally flipped over to my own server for this blog of notes.
I moved off of the Blogger system, 3 reasons:
1) My future posts are highly critical of Google Books, (critical technically, socially, and from a business strategy perspective). Google owns Blogger. This could become an awkward relationship as I begin to rely on, and enjoy using their blog software.
2) I caught Google ‘leaking’ content from posts I had not yet published, by returning search results for various book-scanning related searches, pointing at my blog page. In researching some of my blog posts for esoteric hardware, there is NO reason any of my ‘unpublished’ posts should make my blog hit higher in the Google ranks! I’m non-plussed. In the mood I’m in with them as an organization, I’m not really interested in having my blog (in their system) enhance their search in any core way- they need to pay me a whole of a lot more than the 2gb of blog-space they dole out. :)
Let me be clear, it’s not that I’m looking for privacy- exactly the opposite- I’m publishing this blog for anyone in the world who cares to read it. I simply am not buying all this warm fuzzy love of Google thing- it feels dishonest and manipulative to me. I don’t see them as intentionally being evil, it’s just the nature of how big businesses manifest. Google is no different than any big business that’s come before or after them.
3) I wanted to break the blog into 4 sections, and treat them all somewhat separately. I already got email from 2 people who could care less about my cataloguing ideas, but just wanted to talk tech on scanner gear… etc… Now with this blog, that’s how it’s all set up! People can focus on one aspect of my project, and disregard the rest of my ramblings.
Blogger Was a good place to get the blog started fast, but in the future, I’d use the free WordPress service, or some other independent outfit, to just start… I’m oldschool web like that. The web is about strengthening and empowering many individual nodes.
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I slapped up a WordPress blog using their Open Source software, it’s a PHP/MySQL thing- and I’m quite pleased with how fast it installed (using FreeBSD ports, and Lighttpd! If your sick of Apache, it’s nice!). Wordpress itslef has some rough edges, I did some battle with CSS as a tangent, and to me, it’s only marginally better for page layout and positioning than it was back in 1999 when I last cut my teeth on CSS… I’ve retreated to some html table hacking to get it all over with and running. XHTML be damned, it works reliably after all these years.
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With that, to everyone who’s emailed me with questions and some VERY COOL information, hang tight- now that this thing is running lean and mean, I’ll be posting all that material and continuing!
