The story as best I understand it is this: Blogger in its something-less-than-infinite wisdom has been worrying about its latency rate, the amount of time it takes for individual pages to load, throughout the entire Blogspot system. The problem, Blogger concluded, was that some pages offer TMI. So it decided that it should limit how much data can go onto a single page throughout the entire system. But it didn’t warn users properly and it still doesn’t offer any mechanism for knowing how much is too much. Obviously my blogroll and my standard links list are issues. So is some of my use of graphics – no more grids of ten book covers at the top of a Recently Received list.

I’ve moved the blogroll onto its own page, at least for the time being. There is a link in red in the left hand column. We¹ will continue to update it monthly (or thereabouts). And I will try to run links lists more often so that they will be shorter. I may go to a format like the one my nephew Dan uses – yes, we trade links all the time – but I want to be cautious about this, since I pay a lot of attention to order & to the verbal framing that goes into the link itself. If I can get this straightened out, I hope to bring the blogroll back here.

I’ve also re-configured my archives from monthly to weekly, which has the counter-intuitive consequence of making my archives list more than four times the length it used to be. But the material under each archive link is now limited to seven days, not as many as 31. That helps for some weeks, but I want to check it out for as many as possible. If need be, I may delete some of the older links lists, or even use the links page for them and move the blogroll back here.

I’ve tested Wordpress and there’s no question I could make it work going forward. Incorporating seven years of older blogs is another matter. It puts in aribtrary hard breaks (like after the first word) into what were once standard prose paragraphs. What it does to the formatting of poems I couldn’t even begin to guess, but I suspect it’s not pretty. I would spend a year or more just reformatting the archives if I did that. Still, if I continue to experience Blogger issues, I may move while retaining the older archives here. A million words is a lot to move.

And, as I’ve been asked this a dozen times, yes, I have complete archives offline – or will once I do February’s. One project for the future is to edit a series of small books around specific subjects, but I’m some ways away from that as yet.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience!

 

¹ Lynn Behrendt, who does the heavy lifting of staying current with which blogs have gone dark & is continually adding new ones, and myself, doing a little bit of formatting at the end of the process.