Just a quick post to let readers know that I will be switching blogging platforms after more than two decades on WordPress. This should happen within the next week.
- This will involve no change in blog name (Kellblog) or URL (https://kellblog.com) so web readers should be unaffected.
- Subscribers may be affected. I will attempt to migrate my email subscription list — which they say will work — but if that fails, please re-subscribe in about a week or two.
- Posts will come from a new email so please be sure to check spam, mark the new sender safe, etc.
- I’m not sure of the new email sender, but it will likely be newsletter@kellblog.com or kellblog@ghost.io. I will update things here once I know for sure.
- The feed address should remain: https://kellblog.com/rss/
- Some things will get mangled in the process. For example, Ghost does not support something like the WordPress slideshow carousel so embedded slides seem to end up one giant image. Happily, I always link to PDF versions as well.
- I am not sure if comments are migrating. If they don’t, thank you for making them and I hope you enjoyed the discussion. We’ll have new ones on the new platform.
- Categories and tags will get mangled. WordPress supports both, but Ghost only supports tags. This will likely be a big manually clean-up on my end. Yipee.
- I’m only going to manually check older posts for errors if they’re popular. Thus, older more obscure posts may end up with formatting errors. Please let me know (via comments) if you see one.
- I will also delete some posts in the process as I do from time to time anyway.
- Thank you for your patience in this process. If you have questions or comments, please contact me at my Balderton email address (dkellogg@balderton.com) which I’m currently using as my public email. Alternatively, reach me on X at @kellblog or LinkedIn at /in/kelloggdave.
For those interested in why I’m changing.
- I want to have a more modern look and simpler, responsive design that works better on mobile
- I am running on a long-unsupported blog WordPress template. As a former tech support rep, this makes me uncomfortable.
- WordPress is sufficiently complicated that I use only a subset its functionality and often with great trepidation.
- Editing within WordPress is a house of cards. The experience reminds me of the hilarious Move a Photo in Word meme videos.
- I was unable to hire either third-party or WordPress consultant who could successfully move me to a more modern template. No small amount of money was ignited.
- I am considering charging for subscriptions so I wanted a platform where I could do that easily, with flexible options, and a few clicks. (I have not decided yet and will try to have a freemium model if I do.)
- My experience with Substack’s migration tools made me feel like it was hopelessly ill-equipped. I tried, but gave up fairly quickly — which didn’t make me that sad because they have something of checkered reputation.
Thank you for reading. This will hopefully be seamless for all of you. I appreciate your support. Here’s a preview of the new site.
