Bye-Bye Blogger

Yesterday was it. Today is the formal farewell.

All good things must come to an end. All bad things, too. Thirty-one July, 2020, after nine years and three months and change, my blog on this platform comes to an end.

This second iteration of my 1988-1997 hardcopy zine has lasted nine years, four months and 20 days, very coincidentally close to the original zine’s lifespan. I didn’t write every day, of course. Sometimes I missed entire months. My output was so sparse and sporadic at points I wondered why I bothered. A lot of times I ended up deleting posts because they were just plain dumb. I was writing for the sake of being active. If you’re writing a blogpost for the sake of making yourself write, you’re doing it wrong.

Over time, I was able to build enough evergreen content to keep an interested reader engaged. Unfortunately, Blogger has become increasingly difficult to work with. Yesterday was the final straw. When every hyperlinked line I made disappeared after saving the post, when other saved changes reformatted with every save, when a simple 15-minute post took two hours to correctly format in HTML because the Compose feature doesn’t work as it should, I realized this was more trouble than it was worth.

I mentioned in my last post that I would wait until my blood pressure went down before I made a decision. My blood pressure thus down, the decision is made. This is my last post on the Google platform.

♫"The road goes on forever/And the party never ends."♫

Mind you, I don’t leave angry. Like everything else this year, it’s a passage that was happening sooner or later. This was the year and today is the day. It’s time I learned a new platform, preferably one that works.

I’ll leave everything up for a while as I copy posts into an archive I’m building in Microsoft Word. But as that archive grows, the post list will shrink. I hope to have everything down and a new blog underway by the end of August. In the meantime, I thank those precious few readers who have followed this most sporadic enterprise.

I’ll announce the third iteration of Rockin’ Roy’s Rage ‘n’ Romance! on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and whatever alternate platforms for social media I get involved in. It looks as if the big Internet monopolies are entering their endgames and it’s past time I started searching for something else.

Lord willing, we’ll talk more about this later. Better still, we’ll talk about other things. Until then….

L. Roy Aiken

31 July 2020

Monte Vista, Colorado, USA