Screenshot of the code for DesdemonaIndexer, a software project for creating an index for Blogger posts, by James Galasyn. Graphic: James Galasyn

18 February 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – Blogger, the venerable blogging platform, has been Desdemona’s home since the first post, in November 2008: Rising CO2 accelerates coral bleaching.

Blogger has been a good and faithful host of Desdemona’s content for more than ten years. But due to a confluence of technical issues, Desdemona has decided that  the blog must move to a more modern platform: WordPress.

Migrations of this sort are always risky and fraught. There are many online guides for navigating these rough waters, but one never knows if the voyage will reach the far shore. Since that first news item more than ten years ago, the Desdemona blog has accumulated more then 11,000  posts. It’s a lot of data to move between platforms, and many things can go wrong.

  • You may experience service outages as the desdemonadespair.net domain name gets updated in DNS and the migration proceeds in fits and starts.
  • The new content may be incomplete – there appears to be no way to get all posts from Blogger, because the archive file size seems to be throttled at around 66 MB, so we’ll lose the first two years or so of Desdemona’s 11,602 posts. I’ll try to write some code to download those early posts manually, but there are no guarantees.
  • The appearance will change. The original blog template by Adam Every almost certainly won’t have a close analog on WordPress. Numerous people have told me over the years that Des needs a serious re-design, so this is an opportunity to do this. In the meantime, it may look quite ugly.

What happened? Why are you doing this?

For the geeks among you, the biggest problem with staying on Blogger is Google’s decision to retire the Picasa Web API for managing photos online. This breaks all blog-authoring applications that we bloggers use to write posts. Desdemona uses Open Live Writer (OLW) on Windows, and many Mac bloggers use MarsEdit. Hundreds of people complained in the OLW code repo, but as with a lot of open-source software, one never knows who’s in charge or if the project has been abandoned.

I spent a weekend wrestling with the new Google Photos API and never successfully uploaded a photo. Because Open Live Writer is a .NET app, I was using the .NET client for the Google APIs, but interestingly, they pulled the Photos API after “accidentally” releasing it. Fortunately, Guilherme Oliveira provides a fork that includes the PhotosLibrary code, so in principle, it could work.

But the developer of MarsEdit, Daniel Jalkut , had similar problems and concluded that photos uploaded with the new API can’t be embedded in posts:

Google Photos seems to actively inhibit embedding images from the service … I have determined that is not currently possible to support image uploads to Blogger with supported public-facing APIs from Google.

Read the details: The Future of Blogger and MarsEdit. Daniel’s observation was discouraging enough that I gave up on fixing OLW for Blogger. The alternative to a proper blog authoring tool is using the native HTML editor provided by Blogger, but it’s a truly awful user experience.

Which leaves Desdemona with little choice but to migrate. If the migration is successful, it will probably be a better experience for everyone.  If not, well, ten years is a good run for a blog. Sic transit gloria mundi.