Last night I migrated my blog from a self-hosted WordPress install at Dreamhost to one hosted at WordPress.com. I had hoped to move my blog to Google’s Blogger, but I could not find a way to import the WordPress WXR (WordPress archive file) Blogger.
Why? Well, to start with I wanted to use Blogger for the following reasons. It’s free. You can easily add Google Gadgets and there are many many gadgets. Google is clearly building a distributed social network framework that Blogger will surely add to nicely. I’m referring to profiles and other social networking features add-ons that are similar to what Ringside Networks was trying to achieve. This concept of a distributed social network I find very interesting. I was advocating this concept as far back as 2006 when Steve Bjorg and I were thinking and talking about the Open Web Initiative. I expect to see some very interesting things from Google in this space over the next two years. Alas, migrating to Blogger was painful and I couldn’t find a single tool that allowed me to do so without data loss.
Why did I move to WordPress.com? I’m tired of maintaining my own blog. Also, the server at Dreamhost my blog was running on is really slooooow. Lastly, I wanted a service that would continue to host my blog even after I’m dead. This statement could be received poorly by some. You may think it’s morbid. It is. You may think it’s arrogant. It’s not. I have kids. Enough said.
Yes, I know about Archive.org. This doesn’t do a sufficiently good job of archiving for me. Specifically, you can’t really navigate a site using Archive.org and I want a journal my kids, grandkids, etc… can browse and read after I’m gone.
I tried Squarespace. Deepak Singh just migrated his blog (http://mndoci.com) here. Sqaurespace must be the nicest blogging service online. Were it not so expensive ($14/month with a custom domain) I may have considered it. I would have paid as much as $8/month, but $14 is just too steep for blogging, no matter how good it is. Also, Squarespace failed my: “what if I die” test. If I stopped payment, which presumably I would after death, they would nuke my blog. They should just remove user access and leave the blog there.
You have likely noticed I change the domain from www.oblogn.com to AaronFulkerson.com. I have been blogging at O (b LOG N) since 2004. It has changed domains a couple times in this period. This blog started out as a friend blog with some fellows I went to UNC with. There are still many of their posts. However, when I performed the migration from my self-hosted WordPress to WordPress.com I mapped their author names on their posts to my author name. This was an oversight on my part. I hope some of Konrad Rezka’s racier posts do not later get me into trouble. 🙂
This became a personal blog sometime in 2005; so, I have been meaning to change the domain for a while now. I couldn’t get Fulkerson.com, which would be awesome because then I could host at aaron.fulkerson.com. Nor could I get Roebot.com. Hence the new domain: aaronfulkerson.com
Now, you may be asking: What the hell is O (b LOG N)? It’s a pun on the run time complexity of algorithms. O(logn)…get it? waka waka….
Aaron Fulkerson 
I thought your blog was named “Oblong” because you’re a square 🙂