Goodbye, Blogger. Hello, Wordpress!

Yes, this is the long overdue post, the final kiss-off to my Blogger blog. Yes, I wanted to/should have done this by the end of 2013, but you know how things go.

It's still hard to think that I started the Urban Adventure League blog-type thing almost nine years ago, and a full year after I "founded" the league in 2004. At the time, I was just looking for a quick and easy (and cheap) way to have a web presence, and a blog seemed to be it. I was no blog expert, and didn't really follow any back then, but I chose blogger since it was quick, easy, and free.

I started blogging in earnest. Back then I was still a staunch zinester and felt like printed media was still going to be the primary way I communicated. Over the years my opposition to the blogging medium waned, but I still didn't do it that much. It wasn't until the end of 2010 that I really started getting into blogs and blogging. (And for the life of me, I don't really remember what inspired this "spark".)

Over the past three years, I've blogged a lot more, discovered some great blogs, and made some good friends. My miniscule readership became larger. Of course, over the same three years I've seen some good (and not so good) blogs go away, sometimes with a "goodbye" post, some just simply faded away. A few did what I would term a "flounce" and got all hot and bothered that people were following their blogs and were interested in them as people. (Of course, if they wanted to remain obscure and not receive attention, all they had to do was make a zine instead. The only person who would read it would find it in a zine library in Olympia, three years after it was published, and if they tried to write the address listed, the address would be bad by then.)

Anyways, since I've used the blogger platform since 2005, why change? Changing web addresses always run the risk of losing people in the transition, no matter how well you publicize said transition. Yes, it would be easier to just stay on blogger than wordpress. But to be frank, I just don't like blogger anymore. And I've had some issues with blogger, too.  Here's a few examples:

• Because I started my blogger blog before I had gmail, it's listed under my ancient email address. No matter how much I tried to integrate the blog into my current gmail/Google account, it never happened. This is annoying because I'd always have to log out of gmail to get into my blogger account. With Wordrpess, there is no such issue.
• I don't feel like Google really "cares" about blogger anymore. For instance if you go to blogger via Gmail, you'll find blogger down there with such "popular" Google products like Orkut. I don't know if it's because of the lack of care, but I've found that certain features on my blog don't work as well as they used to, or don't work at all. (Specifically, my link page to other blogs, which died a year or so ago, despite my best attempts to fix it.)
• And because Google is Google, they want everything to go through Google+, including things that just simply required a blogger profile in the past. I don't like that. We give Google enough control over things.

Not that Wordpress is perfect, but there's a lot more things I like about it than Blogger. Like:

• Wordpress is its own thing, and it's in their interest to make sure things still work.
• The Wordpress mobile app is heaps better than the Blogger app. While it's not perfect, it does allow for comment moderation, which as someone who travels, is a big deal for me. Also, I can use my Wordpress blog reader via the mobile app.
• I've got my flickr account connected to Wordpress, so I can easily reblog photos from there onto this blog (and also onto the Society of Three Speeds blog.)
• And I can "reblog" other posts from Wordpress blogs.

The bottom two from the previous list will make it a lot easier for me to provide content on this blog, which means more content in general. Now longer posts will still be the "meat-and-potatoes" of this blog, and I don't want this blog to be just a bunch of things reblogged from other places. (That's why tumblr was created.) But it will add more variety to the narrative and help me share interesting things.

Okay, if you are still reading this on the blogger blog, this will be the last new entry here. Really, it's time to come on over to the wordpress blog. Don't be scared! urbanadventureleague.wordpress.com

Now here's to more years of blogging!