19.

As we celebrate year 19, thank you as always to everyone who reads Collected Editions (this means you! Right now!) and who takes the time to leave a comment. I can honestly say I’m as enthusiastic about running this site as I’ve ever been, and I appreciate that I’m not hanging out here by myself. Big things on the horizon.

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Part I

In February 2023, I lost the ability to back up this blog. I’d been downloading an abstruse XML backup file every month because I know that’s A Thing You Should Do, but the last time I ever did anything with it was 2009 — a kind reader helped me use XSLT to import all the post, comment, and template data into a custom database that runs on a file format I’m no longer using. So, phenomenal collection of backups, itty-bitty actual use out of them.

But suddenly backup downloads stopped working — there were various reports online about backup downloads just hanging. This was around the same time there was much discussion in certain corners of the internet about Twitterific from Iconfactory and Apollo by Christian Selig each shutting down unceremoniously due to API changes by X/Twitter and Reddit respectively. That is, it was a period of very concrete reminders that the problem with creating on closed-source platforms owned by someone else is that your hard work could vanish overnight based on someone else’s whims; when you build your house on someone else’s land, there’s always a danger that land could be sold out from under you.

Faced with the inability to backup, and who knew what might happen next, I seriously considered moving to WordPress (at that point, early in this journey, WordPress was the only alternative I knew about). I tried a WordPress import and posts came through a treat, but comments didn’t — all the lovely words you all have written over the years would be attributed to “Anonymous,” to a one. There was a way, perhaps, parsing over the XML to put this here and that there so WordPress could pull the proper names out, but that seemed a lot of effort for something I hadn’t necessarily been planning to do anyway.

The backup problem still needed solved, but since I was resolved to keep the site where it was, I wanted to understand how it worked — how every piece functioned, how I could change it if need or whim struck me. I took a deep dive into Blogger structure and Blogger tags, the best links of which I’ll leave at the bottom of this post for the curious. I took the whole template down to studs, got clear on the system for looping over the records of the blog post system (title, date, post body, etc.), employed Tailwind to shortcut aspects like dark mode, and relaunched. I’ve been impressed with some extensibility of Blogger that I hadn’t known was there, like employing logic at build time to change the page structure based on page type or even, for instance, change the font size based on a headline character count. It’s strange building all of that into one XML document, but also somewhat appealing.

No one is asking me what I’d do differently if I were to go back to the beginning of this 19-year Collected Editions endeavor, but if they did, I’d say that I would probably use something like Blot or a static-site generator like Jekyll, or heck, host the whole thing with GitHub Pages. I have backups, and sure I have my original drafts, but it is so much harder than you would think to keep everything organized if I correct a typo online and then have to remember to update the original file. A folder full of Markdown files as back-end to the whole blog, a la Jekyll, sounds exceptionally appealing. Something built on text files and open source, such that the site suddenly disappearing would be harder and restoring it would be easier. One single source of truth, as it were.

About four months later, in June 2023, backups started working again, and there’s been no trouble ever since. And I’ve found new some things to do with those XML backups, if it were ever necessary — exporting individual post Markdown files, for instance, through to an entire Jekyll version of the blog that lives on my computer. I’m (hopefully) wiser for the ordeal, and I’ve an eye toward preservation as this blog heads into its 20th year.

But I still kept thinking about that land …

Recommended Blogger Resources:

• Blogger Tutorial
• Blogger Theme Data Tags for Widgets - GeekThis
• Structure of Custom Blogger Themes - GeekThis
• Blogger Book: The Online Blogspot Guide Book
• Blogger Basic Global Layout Data Tags
• Template Data Documentation
• The Complete Guide to All Blogger Page Types