I recently intimated my intention to migrate this blog to a WordPress.org site to give more flexibility – and to avoid the WordPress.com subscription fee. Like so many of my projects, this has come to nothing. I set up the new site without difficulty. But it proved impossible to migrate any of the content. With only 24 hours of the current subscription remaining, I decided to stick with what I have. That’s two days squandered trying to do something both the hosting company (IONOS 1&1) and WordPress.org assure me is a matter of a few clicks. They evidently hadn’t reckoned with my very low fuck-this point.
Incidentally, I also tried to transfer a domain so as to have all my ‘stuff’ in one place. That too proved impossible – with no explanation. As someone who spends a substantial part of their waking hours online – and someone who used to manage a large number of websites – I long since came to the realisation that, for any of a vast number of reasons, something like a third of the web doesn’t work or is unusable. It is a testimony to the massive amount of redundancy in the system that it continues to function in spite of this. I wonder what it would take to cripple the web entirely. I have a strong suspicion that 90% of it could be broken and the remaining 10% would chug along like nothing was wrong. Which is fine if you’re only using that 10%.
The migration having been a total failure, I’m just going to concentrate on writing. A blogsite is a ravenous beast. It demands to be fed constantly. I have been ignoring those demands because it’s so difficult to think of anything new to say about the constitutional issue. Basically, nothing has changed since 2014. Unless it’s that the prospect of Scotland’s independence being properly restored has receded quite dramatically. That is the stark reality that many in what used to be the Yes movement refuse to face.
I have to fill the time between household chores with something. It might as well be devoted to banging the drum for a realistic and effective approach to Scotland’s cause, even if Nicola Sturgeon is marking time to a very different beat.
PS – As a token gesture I have updated some of the graphic elements of the site identity. Or to put it another way, I’ve uploaded a new picture.
Peter A Bell 