Goodbye /Message, Hello Stowe Boyd
Maybe it’s a midlife crisis, maybe I’m bored with old school blogging, maybe the petty annoyances of Squarespace have gotten to me; but whatever the cause, I am moving my blogging from the old /Message (located at www.stoweboyd.com/message) to Stowe Boyd (which is temporarily located at stoweboyd.tumblr.com).
I guess am dropping the more or less superfluous /Message, and making my blog eponymous since it has long been a solo effort, and the /Message overhead isn’t worth the confusion.
via Paul Robinson
For some period of time I plan to keep the old site up, and to slowly move the most important posts over here, and to leave behind a manual pointer and a javascript redirect at each moved post. After some (brief) period, I will redirect the domain here, and take down the old website altogether.
I am forced to these gyrations since a/ Tumblr has no import support whatsoever, and b/ Squarespace will let me export into Moveable Type format, but will not let me redirect posts outside the domain name I am using there.
I had considered Posterous, but the themes seem very scanty there, and the only mechanism for importing is reading one of the existing services they know how to spider, which doesn’t include Squarespace. And at any rate, they don’t conserve the old URLs anyway.
In the next few days I will port over the most active and popular posts, and I will hire a teenager to start working on the archives.
I am forced to leave around 5000 comments behind; I will try to figure out some way to do something about that. Even using Disqus wouldn’t have helped, since all the URLs are screwed up.
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Why I am Going To Leave Squarespace
I have had a number of headaches with Squarespace — the blogging platform /Message is based on — but one is so persistently annoying that it is leading me to start the (terrifying) prosect of moving my blog once again. What is that headache? It is the lowly bookmarklet: the piece of javascript that all blog platforms provide so that a user can start a blog post based on a link to a specific web page being viewed, or perhaps selecting a fragment of text to respond to.
For reasons that escape me, Squarespace has been unable to create a bookmarklet that will copy selected text.
You might think this is a tiny tiny feature, not big enough to start thinking about porting a blog over to an alternative platform. But this is something I do all the time, nearly every single time I start a new blog post.
And I have been waiting for a resolution since I moved to Squarespace in January 2010.
I complained to the support team, who handed me over to the engineers. I got this response:
Hey Stowe,
Please understand that we receive hundreds of feature requests and have limited engineering resources.
We typically prioritize bugs that critically impact site performance or core functionality first, and this issue does not fall into that category.
Again, we appreciate your willingness to use the workaround in the meantime.
Thanks,
Korey
So I guess there are so many serious bug demanding their attention that they can’t fix this extremely annoying UI problem. Their algorithm for fixing bugs leads to low priority bugs never getting fixed so long as higher priority bugs exist. In technical terms this is called ‘starvation’. Oh, and Karey, I am not willing to use the workaround in the meantime — which is already 6 months.
Meanwhile, there doesn’t seem to be any great fanfare about coming features that would make me hold my breath and wait for some glorious future. I had a conversation with the founder of Squarespace a few months ago, Anthony Casalena, who waved his hands about a big coming release, but asked me not to post anything about it. Fine.
The other reason I plan to leave is that the streaming, social dimension that I love so much at Tumblr is completely absent at Squarespace. While the tools provided by Squarespace are solid and workable, they are nearly 100% oriented toward publishing, and zero geared to streaming socially. I am certain that the great majority of Squarespace users are happy with the technology and the company; perhaps it’s just me.
Ok.
Now I just have to figure out how to port my blog to Tumblr. That’s going to be an enormous headache, I know.
Any recommendations? Squarespace does allow me to export my context into a Movable Type-style export file. But Tumblr doesn’t support any blog import at all.
Maybe I am going to have to hire someone to manually cut and paste it all together.
And of course my links will all be broken.
Maybe it would be easier to create a new blog, and simply start over. More to follow.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
