You had a great blog. I’m sad to read that it has come to an end. Thanks for all the great posts and I look forward to reading more interesting stuff on this nice forum.
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Is there a reason why you couldn’t try an alternative blogging platform?
I may get there, eventually. Right now, I have too many other things on my plate to just randomly whip up something brand new, port all my posts in progress over, work out image hosting, etc. The various static blog options look useful, and will import things, but I then either have to host everything myself and add redirects to existing pages, or split my blog and put new content somewhere else… it’s just a lot of stuff that, quite bluntly, I’m no longer good at. Two decades ago, whipping up a new self hosted thing was fine, and I had the server hardware to do it. Now, I lack the hardware and recent skills in web/sysadmin/etc to do that on short notice.
I hope Blogger just fixes their crap and I can go back to using it, because it worked quite nicely.
However, a long break from the general internet will be nice too.
I have hosted sites on Wordpress.com for years. Moved from Blogger to Wordpress,com. Never looked back.
Wordpress, in my history with it, is a remote Linux administration tool with a publishing problem. It’s also quite heavy and obscenely overkill for hosting mostly static content. I’m not opposed to paying for hosting, but I’m not sure at this point I really want to pay someone else to screw stuff up for me.
Well, at this point, I think I’ll finish out my solar install posts on Blogger, and then work on finding an alternative this winter for static content. I can use this Discourse instance for comments/discussion on new stuff, and… maybe self host content, I’ll see. If it’s static, the normal caching providers ought to handle a lot.
how much of the blogger bells and whistles do you actually use? do you use analytics and metrics in some way?
since youre okay with linking to forums for comments it seems you could abandon the concept of blog framework software all together, use any text editor to write articles in markdown, translate to static html, and copy to a site host, like neocities if you want to be free otherwise if you’ve got it pay $20 a year for your own domain and VPS. and never again have to worry your blog is ruined by some other premade blog framework doing what blogger did.
Domain… hm. Like the one I host this forum on? 
The analytics and link logs are nice to see who links to my blog, but I don’t really care that much and can always do post-processing on server logs if I host from a server instead of cloud buckets.
I’ll probably go with Hugo or Jekyll or something like that for markdown to HTML, just… have to do it. I don’t enjoy web stuff anymore, so having to delve into templates and CSS and such is just a circle of hell.
I’m a horrible person to speak on this topic, but i will anyways because its the internet. I’ve never had the discipline to blog, but i’ve thought about it, and every time I look at any of those “simple” static blog frameworks I get totally bogged down with how much configuration there is.
I don’t know what CSS is, don’t know what a DOM is, want to keep it that way and generally agree that web stuff is hell. So if any blog framework doesn’t just let me type markdown and make a website straight away, its garbage to me. The two that I found that were tolerable to me were : GitHub - felipetavares/bake: Bake is a templated blog generator. and make a static site with find(1), grep(1), and lowdown or Markdown.pl — Roman Zolotarev