Notes on using Blogger for bookofjoe — 4 months in

Longtime/constant readers will know that after a mostly happy run of 21+ years, Typepad closed up shop on September 30, 2025.

All those posts — over 40,000 of them — gone ... like tears in the rain.

But I digress.

The many thousands of boj posts simply vanished, like a Philip K. Dick simulacrum.

As I think about it, maybe they were a PKD simulacrum....

Anyhoo, once I got the word from Typepad last September 1, I wasted no time directing my Crack Research Team©®™ to find boj a nice new home.

They investigated many potential blog hosts, none of which were simple enough for me, a card-carrying Technodolt©®™, to use.

The least bad of them all was/is Blogger, Google's ancient, free blog hosting platform.

And so that's where I publish, 3x daily/, 7 days/week, 365 days/year, just like before.

As before, I believe I'm the only blogger still doing that.

Life on Blogger isn't easy: it's really janky in that stuff when published looks way different from the previews:

• Typeface size and font seem to morph randomly

• Posting images and videos takes many more steps

• Image sizes vary wildly and must fit into predetermined templates

• Inaccurate spacing requires many revisions by me to get even a minimally readable result

I could go on.

Long story short: It takes anywhere from 3-10 preview revisions to get a finished post, which means each post takes 3-10 times as long to create as in the old Typepad days — and the resulting posts and blog look nowhere near as good as they did back then.

Sic transit gloria