Time to Cast "Transmute Blog"
As you may have deduced by the little toolbar on the top of the blog, Tales of the Rampant Coyote has been a blogger-based blog for the five-and-a-half years of its existence. And - may I add a tangent - HOLY CRAP how have I been doing this so long?

Anyway, I'm among the 0.5% of people using Blogger who used their FTP publishing system to publish the blog to my own website. It seemed like a clever idea at the time... they were part of Google and not going away anytime soon, I wouldn't have to worry about maintaining and updating my own software, they could worry about security issues, they maintain the database, backups, etc.

But - alas - Blogger has decided to cancel their support of FTP-based publishing. And to be honest --- at over 1700 posts, the blog has become a bit unruly for maintenance. After all, if I make a change to the page template, it has to update 1700 pages to make the changes. It's not a very scalable solution.

And so, not with a heavy heart but rather a heart stricken by minor panic, I have to decide what to do next.

Lest you fear, I have no intention of letting the blog go away. That's not even on the table. I have no idea why you folks subject yourselves to the torture of my endlessly verbose ruminations, but for some reason you do. It's not like I'm some kind of ivory-tower expert on my subjects... in general, you guys collectively know a lot more about what I'm writing about than I do. I learn from our discussions. This has been a great experience for me, and I selfishly want to continue it.

Unfortunately, I'm not nearly as web-savvy as I should be, nor am I up-to-speed on the latest blog solutions out there. Which is why I'm discussing this out loud here on the blog, in hopes that some of you who know much more about it than I might chime in with free advice.

Now, I could go ahead and create a new domain and go through Blogger's own web servers. I'm a little concerned about splitting up my domain like that. Originally, the whole point of the blog was to build up content and traffic for the "real" website, Rampant Games. Granted, over time, Tales of the Rampant Coyote has gained a life of its own. But still... I'm about the games.

Assuming I don't want to do a massive site relocation (although there's definitely the chance the URL might change), something like WordPress might fill the bill. I'm concerned about keeping that one updated, however - especially when the various widgets & so forth that I'd want to make / use might get in the way of easy updates.

I have looked at software like Drupal in the past, but I wasn't pleased with what I saw. It seemed like too much work, not enough flexibility.

It would be NICE to be able to tie the blog (and comments, and logins) directly with the Rampant Games Forums. That's PHP BB. There's usually an endless spam-battle going on there, but I'd love to see tighter integration.

As far as the current blog - I've got way too many links over the last five years to nuke the existing pages. So the current blog will stay, maybe with one last hurrah massive update to direct all the pages to the "new" blog. I may re-publish the "best of" pages with the new blog software over time (while leaving the old pages intact), although it'd be nice to magically migrate the whole thing over to the new system. And while I'm wishing, I'd also like a million dollars. And a pony.

Anyway- so while I'm in deep data-gathering mode, I thought I'd solicit opinions here. After all, you guys & gals are the people I'm writing for. Opinions / suggestions / bits of advice?
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:06 AM (Permalink)