Celebrating Blogger’s Anniversary by Switching to WordPress

OK, the dust has settled, and I have ported all of my content from the old static version of the site to the new WordPress-driven one. My hard-core standards compliance pages remain at a variation of their old URLs (http://tests.petesguide.com/… instead of http://www.petesguide.com/…), but everything else has been ported over to a WP Page with the same URL, or a WP Post (with a URL that may or may not be the same; I still have to create the redirection code to fix that). Customizing the theme to brand it with my sense of style can now proceed.

I didn’t time this to coincide with Blogger’s 10-year anniversary, but the happenstance of my departure seems worthy of comment.

At a time when so much of the cool developments in Web technology seem to be happening around open-source, user-hosted tools that follow good standards and care about important things such as valid HTML, XML, and XHTML code, blogger continues to head in the opposite direction. Blogger’s slow transformation from a service that treated self-hosting Web geeks and the tech-unsavy equally, and provided good tools for both, into a big brother-esqe service that requires hosting on its servers to use all of the latest tools was a move that goes against my core philosophies.

But its poor documentation and insistence on suddenly inserting invalid Javascript code into my posts, with no apparent way to remove the code was simply the last straw.

So, so-long Blogger, and the once-cool hoodie you sent me years ago; it long-since ceased being a status symbol.