I suppose the subject line says it all. “This blog has moved to Blogspot.” The new address is:
https://rickpaulmusic.blogspot.com/ *
All my past blog entries on MySpace have been converted and uploaded into the new blog. In the process, I have also fixed or removed any broken links, making even the oldest blog entries as current as possible. (There are still references to companies that don’t exist anymore, albeit with any links to those removed.)
In case you’re wondering why I’ve moved my blog, the direct reason is that, at least as of this moment, the new MySpace (or should I say “My_____”?) no longer supports RSS for blogs (it does support RSS for status messages). Since I have a few other web pages that depend upon RSS for blog linkage, I wanted to move my blog to a system that supports RSS to avoid having to replicate content.
That said, I’d been considering moving my blog to a more dedicated blogging system even prior to MySpace’s dropping support for RSS. MySpace used to be the place to be for social networking, and more or less a mandatory place for musical artists to have a presence. It was the place where people conversing with their friends discovered and talked about music. These days, however, Facebook has long eclipsed MySpace for social networking purposes. While Facebook itself doesn’t have anything all that great built into it for music discovery, its users are passing around links to music wherever they find it, be that on MySpace, ReverbNation, YouTube, or any number of other sources. Similarly, they are linking to blog entries wherever they may be, rather than having everything in one place as was more or less the case in the heyday of MySpace. It now just seems to make more sense to locate a blog on a system dedicated to blogs than on a social network that has gone out of vogue on the social network front and whose ultimate reason for being at least seems in flux if not even in question.
I’d previously looked at a number of alternatives for blogging systems, and had been leaning toward WordPress, and on possibly hosting WordPress on my main web site. I even did an early experiment with that specific idea but ran into some security issues between my ISP and the WordPress setup that I didn’t have time to fully investigate at the time, thus causing me to temporarily abandon my efforts.
While I won’t rule out anything in the longer term, my near term desire to overcome the RSS issue made me inclined toward seeking a solution I could implement quickly and with as limited a learning curve as possible. Doing some quick research on the state of the popular blogging systems suggested Blogger, the system behind the Blogspot blog addresses, had many advantages, not the least of which was being able to get up and running extremely quickly. In fact, the elapsed time from signing up for a Blogger account and creating and making some basic customizations to, my new blog to getting all my old MySpace blogs converted, uploaded, repaired, and published was less than 48 hours. There is still more I’ll want to do to customize my blog and take advantage of the capabilities of the new system, but it is already as functional as it was on MySpace.
If you’re reading this on MySpace, this will be the last blog entry in this location, so please join me in my (blog’s) new home. If you’re reading this on Blogspot, welcome, and please do stop back for more in the future or subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified of new entries.
* NOTE: This blog has since been moved to the rickpaulmusic.com web site. It is now using WordPress.