New IELP Blog Platform

As I mentioned last week, Typepad has announced they would be shutting down by the end of September and everyone had to get their content off or they would lose it forever. So that sucked.

I had been wanting to get the IELP blog off Typepad anyway though, and this forced the issue, so perhaps it will be a positive overall.

In thinking about where to go, Wordpress was the obvious option, but I use it for other things and find it clunky and annoying, so I was hoping to avoid it. Substack has a number of problems, one of which is that as of the last time I checked they allow only a limited number of tags, and I really like tags, so that one was out.

I decided that if there was someone who could help me make it work, I would switch to the publishing platform Ghost, which I use for China Trade Monitor and really like (especially on the publishing side, which readers don't see). Ghost specializes in smaller independent publishers and thus felt like a natural fit. Fortunately, I found someone who could host it and do the migration, so Ghost is what it's going to be.

As always in life, there is no perfect solution to a problem, with some things lost and some things gained in the blog transition. Also, there is still plenty of cleanup left to do, so bear with me for a while as I sort out all the things that went wrong in the move. (For example, some of the images in old posts may have to be re-uploaded.)

With regard to keeping up with posts, for those of you who follow the blog by RSS, the new RSS feed is here. If you follow by email, Ghost actually has the native ability to send out each post as an email, which lets me avoid third party services that put ads in their emails (check your spam folder though, because I can imagine many emails will end up there for the initial sending). I moved everyone who was signed up for email notifications with Follow.it over to the Ghost email notification system by creating a site membership for you (which is the only way to get the emails), but of course you are free to unsubscribe from emails and/or delete the membership if you want. If anyone has trouble with that, please let me know. Let me also note that many people who were on the email notification list had not confirmed their email subscription, so I didn't bring those email addresses over and those people will have to sign up again.

In terms of things that were lost, I don't think there's currently a way to do anonymous comments in Ghost, which is unfortunate because I found many of the anonymous comments over the years to be valuable. In order to comment, you'll have to create a membership with the site. That just involves signing in with your name and email address, so it's not that big a deal, but it does add a hurdle for anonymous commenting. (You are welcome to create a burner email account and give a fake name if you want to!) I also wanted to mention in this context that creating a membership will sign you up for email notifications of new posts, but if you don't want those you can turn off the emails.

Related to this, for all existing comments, in order to display the comment we had to create a membership for the commenter. For these people, we set up the membership so that you are not signed up for emails. If you want to delete the membership, that's fine of course, but I think that will mean your comment no longer appears.

We also lost, at least temporarily, the threading of the comments, i.e., when the comment section shows that one commenter was responding to another. There may be a way to restore this, but it's going to take some time to figure it out.

One another note about the comments. You have the ability to sort them in three ways: best, newest, and oldest. I would prefer oldest be the default, but unfortunately they have it set it as best coming first, and I can't change that. (Best in this context means most liked – there is now the ability to like comments.) I can see that several people have asked Ghost for more flexibility here, and I hope they will make a change at some point.

On the plus side:

• You can now click on an author's name and see all their posts, which couldn't be done on Typepad. Here's what it looks like for my posts.
• With the email notifications, you get them as soon as the post goes up rather than the next morning.
• The full text search mechanism should actually work, whereas some posts weren't getting indexed by Typepad for reasons I never figured out. (Although it is not working properly on Ghost at the moment, and the hosting company is looking into it.)
• Ghost is working hard to connect publishers to the "fediverse," and I'm hoping to make use of that. I think posts will now automatically show up on Mastodon. After I post this, we'll see if that works in practice!

OK, now back to our regular IELP blogging!