It's Just a Jump to the Left

I am leaving blogger.

Not all at once and I am not shutting the blog down. I am going to continue writing but I'm not going to do it here. I have been 18 years with blogger and to be truthful, it has ceased to serve my purposes, because of how things have changed. I shall explain.

Two months ago I wrote a post about how a company, FeedSpot, was ripping off my content without my permission and without compensating me. That post received exactly one responder, someone else being similarly ripped off, who essentially shrugged his shoulders in a show of "well, what are you gonna do?"

I'll say what I'm going to do. I'm going to stop feeding FeedSpot. And I don't care what the consequences of that is, because I just don't like being ripped off and told to like it. Nor do I like blogger's attitude being, "We're not responsible." But I am not picking up my ball and going home. I'm picking up my pen and going to a place where I have more control over whether or not I'm being ripped off.

The Reader will be happy to know that while you are being lightly inconvenienced, it is not my intent to put my writings behind a paywall. The option I'm offering is that the work I'm doing won't cost any more money, but... and yes, I'm afraid this is the reality, the Gentle Reader will have to sign up. My best options are to move my writings either to Substack or to Patreon, where I can require would-be readers to subscribe for free, while the material itself would no longer be available for an RSS to crawl the material and copy it.

I think that's a reasonable arrangement. I recognise some reasonable people will disagree.

Patreon is better for me than Substack. While Substack produces very pretty large lettering, it sucks balls for the reproduction and placement of images. Patreon is far better... and as I will cease to be publishing on this blog also, https://tao-mapmaking.blogspot.com/, I take comfort in knowing that Patreon does far more justice to my maps than blogger does. It does not minimise the dpi for the sake of saving space, and the maps are clearer as a result. So while I've experimented with Substack, I'm not particularly convinced of its quality as a platform. I know a lot of journalists swear by it. I've known a lot of journalists. I wish I had more respect generally for journalists, but, alas, like I've just explained, I don't.

My plan is as follows:

This will be the last complete post I post on blogger. Previously I have been posting here and then adding a link to this blog on Patreon. I intend to reverse this. Going forward, I will be posting on Patreon and including a link to Patreon here on blogger. I do not care if Feedspot wants to copy my linking Patreon repeatedly. I suspect they won't want to.

This means that if you prefer to find me through blogger, you will still be able to do so. As I said, this blog is not going away. It is being repurposed.

Until the 1st of November, a little more than 11 weeks away, I will still publish under "free access" on Patreon, which will permit anyone to see the content without needing to sign up. Unfortunately, if I publish on free access, feed sites will still be able to crawl my content and they will still be able to copy me. So after November 1st, I will publish under "Free and paid members." This will mean that readers will have to actually provide their email addresses in order to see the content. This is done free. If the reader does not care to do that, then I must suppose my content isn't worth it to you. I'm sorry, but somewhere along the way, however much you say you want to hear what I have to say, tanstaafl.

I apologise for the inconvenience... but I simply will not sit here and continue to let the internet blithely enshittify my humanity.