Friends, Romans, Countrymen

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears (the quote is from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, spoken by Marc Antony). This is the first post in The Online Photographer's new site, on Blogger. 

New posts on the existing Typepad blog will be posted here as well.

...Or back on Blogger, I should have said. I started The Online Photographer (TOP) in 2005 on Blogger. I left Blogger and and migrated to Typepad in 2007, when Blogger shut me out on suspicion of being a "spam blog." Days went by, and I panicked, thinking I was losing all my newly hard-won readers (I actually wasn't, but I had no way of knowing that).

I wasn't any sort of spam blog, of course. The real trouble was that Blogger is an unmanned set-and-forget service, and I couldn't reach a live person for help. I ended up frantically switching to Typepad (stayed up three nights in a row, the last time I ever did that), which was a leading blogging platform at the time and had excellent Customer Service. Shortly thereafter, I was reinstated on Blogger, and some months after that I actually got a very nice letter from someone at Blogger asking me to return to them. But by then I was settled into Typepad.

But time goes on, and things change. Typepad stopped accepting new signups in 2020. They're now referring new customers to their more modern service, Bluehost, on which you can set up WordPress blogs. I haven't received any solicitations bidding me to switch over my Typepad blog to Bluehost, though, so I assume it wouldn't be easy. And, shades of 2007 on Blogger, Typepad recently had some problems, including a two-day outage. Like what happened in 2007, I probably wasn't in any actual danger of losing my work—but, all things considered, it just looks like there might be handwriting on the wall. (I've been casting a jaundiced eye about for that handwriting for a long time now, in a global sense. Nothing lasts forever. Blogs were the hot new thing in '05, but no longer. Me, I'm a creature of the written word, not a performer, not a video guy. As Popeye said, I yam what I yam. The Oracle of Delphi said the same thing: know thyself.) 

I should add that I've been very happy on Typepad. It worked well for me for a long time, and they always gave me help when I needed it—just exactly what I paid for. I've been a happy customer, and I appreciate them. 

Advantages
Anyway, there are some real advantages to returning to Blogger. First, this site is responsive, meaning it is easily viewable on smartphones and tablets. It's best viewed on a computer (laptop or desktop) or tablet—it looks great on the iPad. Images aren't optimal on phones, but posts are readable on them. Secondly, images can be viewed larger. Not as large as some other themes, but I had to balance all aspects when choosing this theme. I'm not a designer, as you can probably tell, but I hope this site carries over a little of the funky, friendly quality of the Typepad main page, as well as echoes of the old color scheme (which was dictated originally by the early theme I landed on originally with Blogger, by the way). Comments can't be handled quite as well—I think the only editing I can do is delete ones I don't like—but there are always tradeoffs. I haven't decided yet if I'll post "Featured Comments," which were originally meant to be a sampling of a variety of comments for people who didn't want to wade through the full Comments section. That's less relevant now that we (like most written sites) have fewer visitors now, and also fewer comments. We'll have to see how that works going forward.

Check out an image:

It looks small in the reader view, but it opens considerably larger than images did on Typepad, at least the way I had my blog set up. 

Another thing I hope to do is to comb through the old material on Typepad and the original Blogger site, plus perhaps my many old magazine articles and writings for other sites, and re-edit and re-post the best of it here. There's a lot of junk in those 9,964(!) posts, but there's a lot of good stuff, too. 

That's all for now. I'll be interested to see how this works. I made a commitment years ago, that I was going to "ride this horse all the way to the inn," meaning, I'd keep TOP going until something killed it. YouTube has come closest, but you, my readers, have kept it going. And hey, some people still like reading the written word. 

Cheers, in the sober sense,

Mike 

P.S. You'll notice this post has a lot of little features in it—italics, bold, a break, a header, an illustration, small type...just wanted to try things. I'll have to get used to building posts on the new Blogger, which has changed quite a bit since I left in 2007. So I hope you'll be patient. But then, you have ever been patient with Yr. Hmbl. Ed., and I am grateful!