UPDATE: Staying at Blogspot until no longer able, WordPress and Substack will be back-up / alt sites
You may have already read this update at Blogspot, but just to cover all bases, I’m re-posting it here as well. Thank you for understanding during this tech-dystopian mess, and thank you for subscribing / keeping tabs on me here, where some kind of content will be done, I’m just not sure yet.
It looks like the work-around may be good for awhile. I’d really prefer not to leave my home of over 20 years, not to mention setting up 2 new sites.
Google *has* already abandoned Blogger and Blogspot -- no help center, impossible to reach anyone, they make changes whenever for no reason, and if they break it, you have to find a work-around or it’s over. Even if you find one, they have turned from apathetic to vindictive against their own users. That’s why I couldn’t even leave comments after awhile -- some seething spiteful flunkie actually coded the “browser not supported” screen into the comment box itself. But I’ll get to the gory details about that in a little bit.
Suffice it to say, I sense them ultimately giving Blogspot the same treatment that Yahoo gave GeoCities -- total demolition. Slightly better-case scenario, they leave up the domain but stop the writers from putting up any new posts or comments. Either way, there’s zero chance they will migrate the blogs at Blogspot to some future site, as they have nothing to move them to, unlike when they killed Google Play Music and forced users into YouTube Music. They didn’t even keep their attempt at social media, Google+, so why would they keep a format that is even less utilized, like blogs?
Just cuz I have a work-around doesn’t mean it’ll work forever, especially given how vindictive the Google-hive has become. Even if it works, they could shut down the entire domain. So, I’m setting up 2 separate sites just in case.
The WordPress one -- The Library of Akinokure -- will be mainly for collecting entire series that I’ve done here, especially those that have mainly been in the comments section, so search engines can find them. That gives me several years’ worth to re-publish in more coherent form. I may even go back through the archives here for series that were already in standalone post form, and back them up there as well.
Right now, I’m working on the work I’ve done about Japanese / Japonic belonging to the Dene-Yeniseian family of languages. Full posts will go up over there, and I’ll just leave a brief remark about it in the comments section here -- in case people don’t want to read an entire 500-word discovery every time, but just get the gist.
I’ve more or less set up the layout, though I’ll be tweaking it and maybe making a new header image, etc., but you can start perusing the Japonic-Dene-Yeniseian linguistic series there right now and going forward.
The Substack one -- just “akinokure”, like here -- will take longer for me to figure out what to do with, since that allows both long-form posting and a micro-blogging comment feed, like I have here. But I don’t want to cannibalize this main site by putting too much on Substack. I’m thinking of using it for pictures in the micro-blog feed. Brutalist mall du jour, vintage book du jour, thrift store find du jour, that kind of thing. I don’t have the layout set up yet, other than making the landing page look like this blog, so there’s not much to do there yet.
The point is, I’ll keep to posting here as much as I can, for as long as I can, and if anything should interfere with that, or end that, you’ll be able to tell. But now, you’ll have 2 alt sites to check on, to see if in fact I’m moving over there for good. For the moment, and unless I specifically say so at the alt sites, they’ll remain alt and Blogspot will stay main.
I don’t like posting these content-free programming notes, but I really did just receive an intense signal from Google that Blogspot will receive even less support than merely being abandoned by them. So I’ve had to waste a bunch of time scrambling to find a work-around, and set up alt sites just in case.
I know the American military is about to commit suicide-by-cop with another failed war in the Middle East, but I’ve already said pretty much everything there is to say about that, specifically about Iran, so my next post here will go into greater detail about the cyber-bureaucracy that controls so much of our online existence, how surreal it is, how to minimize our exposure to its risks, and so on. Might as well get something productive and insightful out of this whole ordeal...

