My first attempt at blogging started in 2001, with a web-site entirely hand-made in HTML. It was crude, it had no commenting, and it was very difficult to maintain it, so it was necessarily tiny. Back then, finding a web host that was both free and would allow you to use your own domain name for free was quite difficult, so I had no option but to go with various questionable free hosting places. First it was united.net.kg. (Where kg is the top-level-domain of Kyrgyzstan.) Predictably, it one day just disappeared. Then, it was digitalrice.com. It had the same fate. Starting from 2007 and lasting until yesterday, I had been hosting my blog on blogger.com (formerly blogspot.com) which, luckily, has been stable.

Blogger had several advantages:

1. Being backed by google, it was unlikely to disappear suddenly and without a warning.
2. It was free.
3. It would make use of my own domain-name for free.
4. It made posting, editing, creating drafts, etc. reasonably easy.
5. It provided a rudimentary commenting facility.
6. It had a built-in search facility.
7. It used a responsive theme so my blog looked decent on mobile too.
8. It needed very little setup.
9. It was reasonably customizable.
10. It even allowed editing the actual HTML body of each post.

Specifically, the ability to use my own domain name for free is why I chose Blogger over WordPress, which checks all the same boxes and more, but wants to charge me a few dollars per year to provide me with the luxury of having my own domain name point to my own blog. I get it that they somehow need to make money, I am not complaining, it is just that if I can have something for free, I would rather have it for free.

Unfortunately, blogger has a number of shortcomings which have been bugging me for years:

• The looks of my blog were kind of dated even right from the start, and that was almost twenty years ago.
• The (supposedly, but not really) WYSIWYG editor would foul up the HTML as part of its normal operation.
• The post editing page wasted an awful lot of screen real estate, providing a very small scrollable viewport for editing the post.
• Certain blog management tasks were very difficult, for example curating tags, and some were outright impossible, for example finding out which images are unused in order to delete them.
• Only a handful of file types were supported, and this did not include ZIP files. Not supporting zip files might be kind of understandable, but still, a great limitation.
• The commenting facility was very crude, resulting in a very poor user experience, which in turn resulted in many people never bothering to leave a comment. One user once told me that they tried to leave a comment but it was lost.
• Spam comments were a very frequent phenomenon, meaning that spam filters were either very poor or completely non-existent.

Most importantly, blogger had certain shortcomings that were outright unacceptable:

• It did not support images in SVG format.
• It did not maintain any kind of edit history of posts and drafts and it did not support fetching them from GitHub.
• It did not support markdown.
• It did absolutely nothing to maintain link integrity in posts containing links to other posts.
• It had been abandoned by google; they did not seem to be putting any work into it, so the shortcomings were never going to be addressed.

Essentially, these shortcomings classified blogger as a platform to use only until a better alternative is found.

So, over the years, every once in a while I would look around for alternatives to blogger. However, I was not finding anything that did not suffer from even worse shortcomings. For example, at some point I tried medium.com, but I got very quickly annoyed by their delusional aspiration to charge people money for reading blog content, their preposterous passwordless sign-in mechanism, and their ridiculous restriction on how much content you are allowed to read before you have to sign-in, at which point you are forced to use their preposterous passwordless sign-in mechanism.

The breakthrough happened recently, when I discovered that nowadays there is a whole world out there, of people creating blogs as markdown files hosted on GitHub, which are then converted into static HTML websites using various tools, and then published on regular web hosting providers. So, I decided to give it a try.

To do this, I first had to convert my blog from blogger HTML to markdown. Blogger did in fact generate an export of my blog when I asked it to, but it was a very complicated set of data without a shred of documentation as to how to make sense out of it. I had to do some reverse engineering to figure things out, and then I had to write an application in C# which read the export, parsed the html, converted it to markdown, fixed links between posts, fixed links to media, processed and added visitor comments, etc. It was a huge amount of work. For any brave souls that might want to try their luck and follow my steps, the DotNet/C# project is here: https://github.com/mikenakis/MarkdownFromBlogger

Once I converted my blogger content to markdown and media files, the next step was to create my new blog from those. How I created it, and how I maintain it, is described in New year, new blog!.

Cover image: the blogger logo from wikimedia.org