Wilkes-Barre Rail Now On (sigh) Blogger

Welcome to the now Blogger hosted Wilkes-Barre Rail.

I realize I'm speaking to a largely dead audience here, at least to any that has a sense of the blog's history over the past three years.  However, the migration to a pedestrian blogging platform like Blogger is a painful concession for me.  Previously I hosted WBRAIL on my own custom-written platform Battle Blog.

I've been long resistant to blogging on a polished professional platform in favor of my own engine because I didn't want to give up the absolute code-level control (oh, and let's be clear, there was nothing unpolished or unprofessional about my platform -- it evolved to look like all others at the end of the day.  It's just that its mechanics were falling apart as web methodologies were changing).  Battle Blog did things even products like WordPress don't do, things they'd want to if I had the ear of their various project or engineering teams.

But alas.  The times have caught up to me.  Maintaining my own engine which was not, shall we say, well incorporated with today's web and blogging landscape, was disconnecting my content from search and easy audience access.  By moving to an actual blogging platform written by others I have instant mobile outreach and clean search engine indexing.

Why Blogger

With so few people left roaming the open WWW to recognize any distinction, I seriously doubt that many will be so inquisitive as to ask why I chose Google's Blogger and not, say, Wordpress or perhaps Tumblr.

The answer is that for my range of publishing and objectives there is virtually no difference between them, save for one.  I am a G Suites subscriber which means I am a "professional class" Google user who pays a small monthly subscription fee to Google for its entire range of products and services for extra features, and sans advertisements.  By contrast, you are probably a "free Google account" user as most people simply are.

As a G Suites subscriber I feel that I am taking ready advantage of a service that is pre-aligned with the IT of my small "business", Dave the Web Guy Innovations.  Were I to skit out to another third party blogging service it would be instantly split from the center of my business and day to day activities within the Google framework.  And, since all blogging engines render blogs that look and behave the same, there's no question of quality or feature ability one way or another.

For me, Blogger just makes the best sense.

Stay Off the Grass for Now

I'm still learning the nuances of Blogger and things here and there "just ain't right" yet.  I'd avoid commenting until I decide how I'm going to handle that.  I'd like to incorporate the Disqus engine, if I allow commenting at all.

I also have three years of previous Wilkes-Barre Rail content that in some shape or form I'd like to re-post in order to give each new visitor a more robust sense of its history.  But of course each of those posts was written and presented in a different time.  As such, you're likely to begin seeing a library of posts prior to this actual first one, as I enter them and then back-date their entry times.

So, it's going to be a little crazy for a bit.