Can you wipe the slate clean with a blog?

Carlos has decided to close Cazuela de Pingüino and reincarnate his blog as “El Diablo está en los detalles” (The Devil Is in the Details).

Over time many bloggers realize they want more expressive and creative freedom with their sites, and the need for a domain and a server of their own comes up spontaneously. At the end of the day, when you get into this blogging thing you want to experiment and not be limited by the blog service, however good it may be.

For example, one of the things that bothers me about blogspot is that many blogs require you to register with that service in order to leave a comment. That, and the fact that many bloggers are censored on the orders of their respective governments, with which Google avoids having conflicts.

But what are the consequences of migrating a blog?

Link permanence

What makes a cool URI? A cool URI is one which does not change. What sorts of URI change? URIs don’t change: people change them.

Tim Berners Lee warns us about the lack of persistence of URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Links are URIs, and when they disappear, problems follow.

Personally, I’ve committed the sin of completely changing blogs, and afterwards I’ve gotten complaints from users who followed a link on Technorati, or some other site, and ended up in Limbo (forgive me for talking about something that no longer exists).

I suggest reading Berners Lee’s article: Cool URIs don’t change.

Carlos has every right, and the need, to move his blog to a new place and a new address, but it isn’t that easy to get rid of Cazuela de Pingüino, because many links, mine and other people’s (Technorati’s included), will be lost.

Personally, I don’t have time to change the links I already made to his previous blog.

Abandoned blogs can’t be allowed to exist; they have to be preserved. But then again, will they be preserved by the companies that provide the service? Like blogsome in this case.

There’s another problem: if you decide to go with your own host, you have to consider the costs of maintaining the site and buying the domain.

How long do you want your blog to last?

Most blogs don’t last more than 3 months. Many aren’t worth visiting. A lot of it is fashion, putting up a blog because it’s cool, etc.

If you want to be serious about blogging, you have to remember that The Devil Is in the Details, and one of those details is the trail you’ve left on the net. Once you’ve published a post, and that post has been linked to, you have in a way committed to keeping the link alive forever.

Complicated, isn’t it?

Well, I’ll take the opportunity to wish Carlos good luck with his new blog, and I suggest you visit it, because he always has something interesting to contribute.