What have I done?

Actually, fixing my blog here on Blogger wasn’t so hard.  However, in the process of tweaking things this morning, I did a Google search and ran across a fairly recent article predicting Blogger will soon shut down; the writing is on the wall, the guy said.  Well darn.  The only other option, and it IS a popular one, is Wordpress.  I’ve always sort of wanted to use Wordpress, but it seemed more difficult to me.  I’d start a blog there, immediately mess something up, and just throw in the towel.  Back to Blogger I’d go.  

When AOL Journala shut down, they gave us some warning and we were shown how to save our complete AOL blogs by importing them to Google Blogger.  It was easy, albeit time-consuming, out here in the boonies with our slow Internet speeds.  All my pictures (except ones hosted by AOL) made the trip, and all comments were intact.  Google has been easy for me.  But in getting my blog up-to-date this morning, I noticed they don’t offer the widgets they used to have.  Somehow, that’s the bit of information that led me to some tech guy’s article saying Google Blogging is likely going to close down, so they got rid of some options.  That’s what started me down this rabbit-hole.  

Switching from one platform to another isn’t so easy, in this case.  Oh, the directions talk like there’s nothing to it, but I’m just not in the league with all those nerdy folks who do that sort of thing easily.  My first step (I know this is boring to most of you, but I have to vent) was to go to my current blog and import it to my computer so I could later export it to Wordpress.  Ha!  I tried that, but at some point it just stopped downloading in the middle of things.  I couldn’t look at the content that had been saved to my computer because I don’t have any way to open the file that I know of.  For some reason I can’t get the Mac Mini to download Open Office, so I have no way to read documents.   I’ve been blogging here on Blogger for twelve years, and for at least a couple of years before that on AOL.  There’s a lot of my history on here.  If Cliff says, “I wonder when we went to the Rollag tractor show”, I can do a search of my blog using “rollag” as the search word, and there it is.  If I had to, I’d pay to get a tech person to do this for me, because my main blog is like a child to me.  First, though, I’ll talk to my daughter and see if she has any options for me.

Armed with this information, I won’t modernize the current blog any more.  I have to somehow get my blog moved to Wordpress, THEN I’ll change what needs changing.  

Unhappily yours,

Donna