it’s pretty amazing, in this day and age, how your platform can matter.
so a very long time ago i had wordpress, a free wordpress blog, which basically got hacked. (also, a creepy guy had made this kind of secondary website out of the comments on an entry and was using it to sell sewing machines. it was pretty crazy.)
so i switched to typepad, because typepad lets you slap passwords on things.
and then i started writing again, and i knew it was a historical novel, and i wanted to have a place to talk about the process and the research alongside the actual writing. and there was my typepad stuff already set up, so . . .
two years later, when it became clear that i was in fact going for it with this writing, that it wasn’t like earlier novel attempts where we drag ourselves across the finish line and shove it in a drawer . . . two years later, i realized that i could have my own space, complete with emails and whatnot, for the price typepad was charging me. dandy! signed up, migrated the blog, started fiddling with looks and fonts and whatnot.
but there were problems.
the main one being that the blog posts—some of which i did indeed need to refer to, as they were quotes from texts i was referring back to—felt completely buried. the pre-designed archive page is not helpful, and trying to create a new one would take a lot of time. and i had already spent a lot of time just doing little things, like taking the strange white line out of the footers, or forcing layouts onto pages.
tumblr, however, had an archive page which i utterly loved.
so the solution? to keep the longer, rambling posts about Writing and The Meaning of it All here, while putting the reference-y soundtrack-y stuff over on tumblr. not an exact science—there are duplications and omissions—but it feels like it will be cleaner going forward.
and then i realized the other fun thing about migrating your blog.
all of the pictures are still living over at typepad; that’s where they’re drawing from. obviously i glazed over all the online guides to this that mentioned the many mind-numbing hours spent repairing links. why would you need to repair links? i wondered. all my article links, they’re just fine!
oh, right. THOSE links.