It's Time To Kill The Blog

Gosh, I hate using teaser titles like that...although it's true...in a way.

Last May, I decided it was sort of silly to have MichaelMain.com which was for the most part stagnant, and have my blog at michaelmain.com/blog.htm. So I moved the blog to the main page - pardon the pun.

I also redirected the old site to this one so folks could make the transition. I just assumed they eventually would.

That move alone cut the blog's readership by about 50 percent...at least I'm hoping it was that and not my extended period of whining.

Let's not debate that point okay, I'm in kind of a pissy mood already :)

I'm really not concerned about web hits, I'm not a stat freak. As selfish as it sounds, I've always said I write this for me...not you...although I'm glad those of you who aren't staring at blinking words come along for the ride. I don't know what I'd do without the support and fellowship of the blog community.

I am a little stunned you read some of this stuff...but there's no accounting for taste.

I also sort of assumed that people...even really procrastinating people...would eventually get annoyed by being redirected and would make that "transition." You know, change their bookmarks, blogrolls, etc...

Um...to put this delicately, some a lot of you are really lazy. When I started this little rant I thought I'd just call out one or two folks by name **fake sneeze Gordon** however after running down "my blogroll" and checking the links of folks who link to me...there actually are more people who still have the old address listed on their sites than have the new one.

It has been more than four months...I'm just sayin'.

So anyway, today I stopped the redirection which means presumably a lot of you won't read this anyway, instead you get to stare at a really annoying page that blinks.

I'm going to give that a week or two...and then I'm going to delete it entirely. Yes, sometime in October the "old blog" dies.

This is really not entirely because people are still linked to it, but also because of an archive issue which is rooted in the way I originally set up the blog. For some reason Blogger won't direct permalinks to some of my really old posts to go anywhere except to those really old posts, which don't have the proper extension - yeah I know this is geeky stuff...and I don't really think a lot of folks go back into the archives anyway. But I do...and it's annoying. Just FYI if you do go to a permalink and it comes up looking like a bunch of code all you have to do is type .htm at the end of the address that comes up in your browser's address bar and it will work.

I've tried lots of things to fix the permalink deal...wasted enormous amounts of time.

I've deleted all the archives, republished them with proper extensions. I've deleted the entire blog (you weren't looking...maybe you were staring at the blinky thing) and then republished only the files I wanted...no luck. I'm fairly certain I'll have to go through each post and manually edit them. I've found a way to do that fairly quickly, but it's still a pain.

And there's always the possibility the "old blog" is re-archiving that stuff....so, that gives me another reason to want it dead.

I'll likely still be frustrated...but at least I'll have killed something which I'm thinking may give me some type of primitive satisfaction.