It’s been a quiet Sunday. Since I’m caught up on my CMA exam studies and in a holding pattern with the job situation, I’ve been spending most of the day doing some initial work on migrating this blog to a new platform.
When I first started The Ireland Dispatch, I chose the most easiest-to-use, off-the-shelf and free platform available, i.e., Blogger, which was originally launched all the way back in 1999 before being purchased by Google in 2003. I was able to get up and running with Blogger with minimal effort. However, over the years Google has been slowly shutting down Blogger’s functionality, as it has done with many other products/services it has acquired. In April, I received a notice saying that the email subscription feature would be turned off in July.
For anyone who is subscribed to blog posts over emails — no action is required on your part at this time. I am working on another email subscription service that hopefully will continue to feed off Blogger for the time being. In the longer term, I am planning on migrating the blog to my own website domain, https://theirelanddispatch.com, which is already active with a “Coming Soon” placeholder page.
In addition to solving the email subscription problem, I am learning more than I ever wanted to know about creating websites with WordPress, which according to Wikipedia, is “used by 41.4% of the top 10 million websites as of May 2021” and is “one of the most popular content management system solutions in use.” The challenge is that WordPress has so many bells and whistles that it’s overwhelming. I wish I could just push a button and have it copy over everything from Blogger, and everything would look and feel the same — I don’t really need it to look polished and professional. Most of the themes and templates available for WordPress are so cluttered, as compared to the minimalist aesthetic I prefer.
Although recently I’ve been posting less, I still enjoy blogging as an outlet for creative writing and photography. Putting together a post helps me appreciate my day-to-day experiences more deeply, even if no one reads my posts. I had never written a blog before, although a long time ago I used to send out email newsletters to friends and family. Since then, social media overtook blogging as the preferred way to share updates with one’s social network. However, I quit Facebook in 2016 and have never looked back, and I’ve never really understood the appeal of Twitter’s terse form of expression.
So now I find myself reverting to blogging, 20 years late to the party. That said, blogging has evolved from its early days as an online platform for personal newsletters to a much different more complicated phenomenon involving SEO (search engine optimization), influencers, and monetization through ads and paid content. It seems less about sharing one’s personal experiences with people you know in real life as it is about building and promoting one’s “personal brand” in the free market of the internet. Again, that’s not really what I’m after, but perhaps learning about all this stuff might be helpful for other projects in the future.
