Monday, September 08, 2008

Go Forth and Multiply

Most of the Blogger-based blogs that I read have been seeing fewer and fewer comments as of late. After a while I figured that this wasn't because those blogs were losing a certain degree of popularity; rather, these blogs had simply moved to an alternate presence in Multiply, and they were getting their comments there as a result.

So I began posting a few comments on Multiply. Nothing fancy, of course... just a few things here and there to involve myself in some public discussion. After a while, however, I started to get a little apprehensive about my site there. As it stood until a few days ago, if somebody wanted to look up who I was, they would have found an empty Multiply site with only a single link to this blog.

I mean, I've obviously resisted the urge to move this blog for a while now. I simply have too much history here (in the form of over six hundred posts, as well as a lot of custom sidebar links) for me to change at the drop of a hat. In addition, I don't take a lot of photographs, which doesn't give me much incentive for moving to the more distinctly image-based Multiply.com. However, I feel that if I'm to continue posting comments on the Multiply network, I've got to have some form of content waiting for people who pass by my site. It's embarrassing to have nothing but an empty profile to offer people -- in fact, it might even imply that I don't have any legitimate background behind me.

So as of tonight, I've started importing my blog articles onto my Multiply site. I've already run into issues with my six hundred blog posts (of which Multiply only seems to capture the last five hundred), and I've already spent a good thirty minutes clicking and unclicking article selections to make sure that some of the more frivolous articles wouldn't necessarily show up. As people are not likely to read my stuff from two or three whole years ago, I'll just leave the older articles where they lie.

I'll still be posting my entries here for the foreseeable future, of course; I'm just more comfortable with the Blogger interface right now. I'll need to double-check Multiply to make sure that my page layouts don't suddenly go all wonky on me, but I think I can take that. If anything, my biggest job probably involves "fixing" all those old posts that didn't take the transition very well. That, and I've got to find a better layout for the site -- the aesthetics over there aren't exactly the best in the world.

In the meantime, I've adjusted my welcome message on Multiply. Visitors should now know that my home over there is under renovation, and should hopefully look habitable after a couple of months.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad to know you're still going to keep this site. :) As much as I like Multiply, sometimes I feel it's too crowded -- in people and in content. :P

Sean said...

Ida: It's a lot more crowded, yes... but I'm really after a bit of active discourse here. And in any event, at least I don't have to redo my writings in Multiply. :)