Pausing The Old, While Not Pausing The New
While I’m going to continue posting here, when there’s a reason for it, I’m holding off on manually importing any more old posts. The best thing about Pika is that it’s dead simple and offers me almost no temptation to tinker, because except for a little CSS there’s nothing to tinker, and this is why I decided to land here.
That said, the thing that’s been nagging at me the entire time is that I’m a firm believer that blog posts should have date-based URLs, and that blog permalinks without them are the spawn of SEO hacking, where all your “content” is supposed to look as fresh and timely as possible, now and forever in perpetuity. Whereas I believe blog URLs should convey information.
So, I’m going to spend the time I’d otherwise be using to manually import posts here instead to clean up and conform the markdown files comprising the archive of my blog as it stood back in March when I quit blogging. (Yes, there’s still a forthcoming post here about how that turned into a six-month hiatus instead.)
What I’ll then do with those markdown files remains an open question, because there still isn’t a straightforward path to a blogging platform that’s dead simple and offers little to no temptation to tinker and that also uses date-based URLs.
(Blot, potentially, although I ran a test import and it took about thirty of the markdown files and treated the front matter as if it were the start of the post text, and didn’t handle untitled posts the way I thought it would based on some support threads, and I’m unsold on the idea of not having an editor and instead having to write everything locally and sync it to Dropbox.)
In the meantime, I’m also likely going to manually enter internal backlinks into my markdown files, which make them both future-proof and platform independent because they’ll be hard-coded into the posts themselves. Of course, this requires that wherever I end up in the end can make use of my existing, date-based permalink structure. The one that went away when I started adding posts to Pika.
This is not, then, a hiatus, because as things come up I’ll be posting here. It’s just that I’ll also be making local markdown backups of new posts, while I work on cleaning up and confirming my markdown archive.
It remains as ever frustrating that there continues not to be a blogging system that suits my use case, especially since I don’t actually think my use case, were I to fully spell it all out, is an outlier. I think other bloggers would use exactly what I want to use, if it existed. It doesn’t, so I’m not really sure where all this is going to end up.