Goodbye Blogger
After a long time it was finally time to move off Blogger (my first post was in 2002!!) and move it to a platform that I fully controlled.
The incident that lead to this was a few weeks ago I was wanting to see if I had written a post about the earlier Marvel movies when I saw the first Iron Man. I went to my blog and noticed that any time I tried to access a post that was written before 2006 I was presented with this bizarre error
Figuring it was some site issue, I logged on to Blogger and tried access older archives and was presented with an weirder, obscure error
Fearing I had lost access I tried a back up and even that failed !!! Quick google searches of the errors yielded nothing on Reddit, StackOverflow and even Googles own forums. This was catastrophe because it meant I lost years worth of writing some all the way to high school.
I then remembered that Google has their Takeout service which lets you download all your data that is housed on their platform. Luckily, that export worked and I was able to download everything, along with the comments. The only problem was this was an atom file and none of the importers written for Wordpress would import it properly. The blogger importer also wouldnt work because my old posts on blogger were bored…..the RSS importers for WP were however very robust.
I found an XLST file to convert ATOM to RSS and using MSXML I was able to get a proper RSS feed and import all my posts ( 350 of them) in to Wordpress.
This was great news because I had everything backed up. Sans the comments however, since majority of them were spam and it was too much work to get all linked together to the correct post, so they just remained in my back up.
I wanted to host the blog something light and not have the overhead of a database, keeping PHP and wordpress patched, so I decided to go with a static blog. I went with Hugo because Im a big Golang fan. Hugo has an exporter for Wordpress and it easily imported everything over.
At the end of this, I have all my files backed up, the posts are published as HTML and I plan on using Google Firebase to host it along with Github. Thanks Blogger for all the years of free hosting, but the thought of losing all my posts with basically no support was more than enough to convince me to move on. More on the tech stack later.