Blogger, Blog move & Comments

Frank_Sinatra_Hollywood_star-2017-08-7-15-15.jpg

“And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain”
My Way, Paul Anka/Frank Sinantra
(public domain picture from WikiCommons)

Don’t panic!

I’m not going away, this blog is not finishing.

But it is changing. And with the change there will be some loss.

Blog entry 1 appeared in April 2005, and after 12 years on Blogger this blog is moving and that move has a downside.

I’ve always been happy on Blogger but in the last few years I’ve been operating three website: the blog on Blogger, allankelly.net – a static site written in RapidWeaver and my commercial site, Software Strategy (www.softwarestrategy.co.uk).

This means my efforts have been split between three sites, and Google has seen me as three sites. Given that my web presence is part of marketing my training and consultancy that might not have been the smartest move.

So last month I decided to merge the three sites and adopt a new corporate identity. Most of the move has been done, Software Strategy is now doing to allankellyassociates.co.uk, the blog is mostly moved – thanks to the great work of the folks at CMS2CMS, highly recommended – and here in lies the problem….

CMS2CMS have done a great job of moving the blog posts, images and comments. But they can’t move all the comments. That is because around October 2014 I switch the comments from Blogger to Google+. The comments on Blogger, before October 2014, can, and have, been moved across, but the comments on Google+ can’t – so all comments left since October 2014 are lost. I regret the decisions to switch to Google+ comments massively.

So many of the comments over the few years (I’m not sure exactly how many!) are about to be lost when the Blogger blog is set to redirect to allankellyassociates.co.uk.

In order that the comments are not lost entirely here are some of my “greatest hits” as PDF files with comments and the view count according to Blogger:

I could go on, I’m sorry I can’t save more comments, it is sad looking now at all the comments, far more than I thought there were. I’m also amazon by how the blog has grown, from early posts with, maybe, a hundred views to a regular audience of thousands and sometimes tens of thousands.

And I completely blame Google and G+ for this, on Blogger Google are quite supportive of blog exports but there is nothing equivalent on Google+.

O, the third site, allankelly.net, this is mostly an archive of my writing down the years and it too will disappear inside www.allankellyassociates.co.uk in the very near future – most of the content is already moved.