My digital consolidation is complete
I’ve finally finished the process of moving my old posts over to this site, hosted on Micro.blog. A couple of notes on the finishing touches:
- Final tally. I moved 222 posts from the old site to the new one. I didn’t transfer everything, but I did transfer everything relevant. Not every post needed to make the move, but I saved more than I had originally planned to keep, including a bunch of old Adobe Indesign and Illustrator tips that may or may not be relevant.1
- Redirects. I set up a bulk list of redirects from my old sketchbookb.com posts to their new home on bobwertz.com. I’m really happy that any old links will continue to work.
- A new Sketchbook B. I used the Micro.Blog single page sites that are included with my plan2 to set up a new Sketchbook B page that simply includes links to my newer sites. I also customized a 404 page, since people may end up there if they have an old link to a post I didn’t move.
- I hate DNS settings. I don’t know why they make me nervous, but they do. I struggled to get Cloudflare’s DNS settings to work when I moved from Squarespace to Micro.blog. And the time it takes for changes to propagate across the network is just long enough for me to second guess myself.
- Farewell Squarespace. I was a big Squarespace fan for a long time. I’ve had an account since 2008. My original setup on Micro.blog actually connected to my Squarespace site. It worked well for me for a long time, but the reality is that Squarespace hasn’t cared about bloggers or open APIs for a very long time. It’s time to move on and save myself some money. I’m going to wait a few days to make sure everything works okay, and then cancel my subscription.
- Powerful tools. I couldn’t have done this without Chat GPT and MarsEdit. ChatGPT helped me resolve issues with my Python scripts and with setting up the file formatting for the redirects. MarsEdit let me easily edit the imported posts, adding categories and headers. I couldn’t have pulled this off without them.
And so now, I have everything in once place. Almost everything I’ve written on the web and every picture I’ve shared is here on bobwertz.com, gathered from Squarespace, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. At some point soon, I’m going to write more about the changes in my philosophy over the years that drove me to this point, and where I want things to go. This was a significant amount of work and I’m glad to be done. I also completely understand why people abandon sites instead of migrating posts.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008 and all of those posts are finally gathered on a single site.