Or: Why I’m leaving Squarespace

A year ago, in the wake of the Google+ anti-pseudonym fracas, I decided to take my blog to a paid hosting service called Squarespace. The renewal date is fast approaching - and the service is not worth the USD 144.00 they’ll charge me if I don’t cancel. There has been no development to speak of in the last year, there are no new widgets, the UI for creating/editing posts is frustratingly slow and requires too many “are you sure?” confirmations (such as, switching from WYSIWYG to HTML and back), uploading images is far from user-friendly… you get the idea.

$12/month is pretty steep for what basically amounts to server space.

 Meanwhile, the original “Telling: Like it Is” has remained live on Blogspot – which is a good thing, because I never got around to pointing internal links between posts from there to the Squarespace URLs. And, as things developed, my Gmail and Picasa accounts were never in danger, nor was the blog. The trick to that was simple: Don’t have a G+ account in your avatar name! Your other Google services will be safe from being shut down, whether or not they’re integrated through Google Profiles.

So, yeah – I could have just moved the last year’s worth of posts (all 13 of them; I’ve been busy in RL, as you may know) to Blogspot and have done with it. But I didn’t. I still don’t trust those bastards guys. Two export files later, there is now (temporarily) a third version of this blog, soon to be the only version.

It’s at WordPress: lalotelling.wordpress.com/

As of today, it’s still under construction… that is, I’m going through the tedious labor of deleting duplicate imported posts, changing all those cross-reference links, making sure the images are correct, and re-building the SL History page to suit. But it’s all there, posts and comments intact.

And that’s where I’ll be, and I hope that’s where you’ll redirect your blogrolls and bookmarks.

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UPDATE (26 Sept '12): All of the above has been complete for a while... Today, I finally have time to take down the content of this instance, except for this post. I hope you'll join me over there.

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