Finally took the plunge to move away from Google’s blogspot to my own fully owned online home ♥

Okay back to taking a break from a schedule this week 😉

I attempted to move years ago but blogspot was a pain. And getting used to WordPress too. And people told me to not do it. It’s a considerable investment too to self host so I didn’t get fancy features. I just don’t want my content to be trapped on a free platform so I went into the fog, hoping things will work out.

And it did! (: Super relieved! Maybe one day I’ll actually have a place of my own in real life ;P

Super proud that my newbie, rusty web development/computer science skills from university came in handy + life saving WordPress plugins + tech support chats. Managed to corrupt my files at least 2-3 times and how transferring kept failing. Some kind peeps reached out, offering to help too – super appreciated!

It took me almost my whole weekend to smooth old blog posts over, a basic formatting pass, tags and category sorting, hunting down the php file to turn off unimportant debugging error messages, adding/hunting for CSS tweaks, looking for a basic theme and widgets I liked, nitpicking everything and typing my comprehensive sidebar in html.

My old blog secretly exists as a backup but it won’t be updated anymore. It’s been a great thing.

What didn’t work:

I couldn’t bear editing my super old and terrible early posts so I didn’t fix them. Gosh I see my old work and I cringe. My art is terrible :<

Any direct links to blog posts from past social media posts will be broken because URLs are case sensitive and I used a lot of uppercase letters in my old links. They don’t allow this in WordPress blog links. Whoops! And I can’t seem to fix  that green text colour in CSS for an active page link in the top menu. I can’t seem to find the code. That’s all the nitpicks I have.

I decided to not use disqus anymore and start from scratch with comments. Since I check and edit things here the most, maybe I’ll keep telling people to comment here instead of social media…but I don’t control anybody! People do what’s convenient to them anyway :<

Internal Debate on being an artist on social media

When I was considering the move, I thought I should quit blogging altogether since it’s apparently a dying thing to do thanks to social media, podcasting, streaming and Youtube video production. And instagram…which is a quick, convenient, passive consumption of others’ work. Aye, I get it as I have short attention span sometimes too. I still believe long form content is great!

Considered starting up podcasting or rambling over art timelapses again [both of which didn’t last because they’re not interesting and are time consuming to do well, consistently and properly]. So I couldn’t find the conviction within myself to do it and I don’t think anyone wants to listen.

I know streaming isn’t for me…the last thing I want to do is perform in front of a live audience. But it’s less time consuming…and something I can do when I’m in a better headspace in small amounts. So I might start up twitch to get myself working through art one day.  Perhaps I can narrate what I’ve written as a podcast?  Who wants that though? That’s more work too! My gut feeling doesn’t want any of this right now. I need to take it slow for my mental well-being. Still working through things :<

For now, I’m just content to share what I do here and then link it over on social media and my tiny mailing list.

Ultimately I enjoy blogging so, so much – enough to invest into my own self hosted website. I can just ramble, articulate, process, reflect and type away on a quiet platform of my own. Away from the social validation circle of social media.

This blog is for me firstmost anyway ;D

Thank you for coming by like-minded, lurking soul! (:

Feel free to comment below with feedback!

Especially if anything else is broken! (:

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