Migrating to Blogger

Believe it or not, this site is hosted on Blogger!

I just realized how customizable Blogger theme is. It allows you to edit the entire layout (using xml that allows you to "program" the html and css). I managed to keep the iconic header of my site, and use an existing theme for the contents and navigations.

Back in year 2000, I wrote PHP script for my site connecting to MySQL database to store the posts and comments. I was 18 years younger back then and had plenty of time to code. The problem is, sometimes I will need to migrate the site to another server and I don't have the time. I was thinking to convert it to a static site so that server migration will be as simple as copy-pasting (no database setup needed), but still converting the layout is a painful experience.. Do I have to copy paste the header and footer to all the pages? Then there is this idea of using Angular to create a static bundle like how the angular.io site is built for the tutorials and docs, and host the comments in Firebase, but as I said, I don't have the time to build it. There has to be a better way...

I decided to take a chance of migrating my site to Blogger (it has been around for almost 20 years now and there's no sign of being shutdown). The offered functionalities are basic, but I did try including a <script> tag and it runs. I think I can do a lot fancy stuffs with it. Nowadays, static sites (that can run Javascript) can pretty much do anything by calling API to other servers.

I will gradually migrate my old contents to this site as I have the time ...