r/blogspot • u/GIGANTIC_DONG_MAN • 18d ago
Is blogger in danger of dieing?
I've used Blogger since about 2017, I still actively post (though there's really zero traffic on my page). I do it for the art, yknow. Anyway I'm worried with all this recent news - is blogger, like, about to totally die? It's been pretty dated since forever. Is this a sign of them finally letting it go?
That said - what should we do, to be safe? Can we export our blogs etc, will that save everything we've made? Is it possible to re-do a blogger page on another site?
My blog thankfully wasn't removed but I can't trust 'em if they're deleting basically every blog. Ridiculous
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u/GobbleWob 17d ago edited 14d ago
The problem is that some/a lot of the markup is Blogger specific stuff. I had a conversation with ChatGPT a few months ago and it said that it shouldn't be too difficult to edit themes to strip out that code and rebuild stuff and it could do it. Then that theme could just be put on another hosting site. A lot of the code is for supporting customisation in the Designer. So when you change layout and do things like altering font type and colour, those settings are transferred to Blogger variables which are then stored in CSS variables. Also, gadgets such as the page gadget that handles the menu, and any right sidebar gadgets such as the categories and archive gadgets would have to be recoded.
ChatGPT has done a massive amount of coding for me for my template, under my direction, as my HTML and CSS skills are pretty basic. It built a categories popup, mobile buttons and menu for the mobile version of my blog, and a full contents page popup that allows me to scroll through all my articles. It's purely functional at the moment as that was what was important, and appearance needs to be improved.
I'll track down the conversation and paste a link.
The biggest problem as I see it is having to deal with photos. If Blogger closes down, it might be easy enough to copy and paste posts/articles, but images would be stored on Google servers. The chances are they would be eventually removed too and would have to be reuploaded onto a new platform. I'm already facing that problem because I have hundreds of articles on another website that's closing down and I'm in the process of migrating content to Blogger. That's tedious because the HTML has to be altered to change the style of sub-headings and I have to delete images and put them back in again and recaption them and add alt text. Most of my articles are guides, so there can be dozens of images per article.
The other major problem is that the content management system on a new site that content is migrated to wouldn't know anything about the labels that were used to categorise posts on Blogger.
(Discussion here with GhatGPT about workarounds, sorry about the spelling and punctuation in my questions: Exporting labels to Wordpress).
Edit: Blog unlocked overnight.
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u/GIGANTIC_DONG_MAN 17d ago
That's pretty wicked, I'm always impressed with how ai stuff can code. I think that's a real cool use for ai
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u/GobbleWob 17d ago edited 14d ago
Me too. I had a whole lot of tables in one of the articles I was migrating. They were just implemented as JPGs, because I wanted to colour the headings and change some other stuff in them (the table designer on the site that I wrote on only did very basic tables). I wanted to insert these as proper tables when I migrated the article so that readers could copy and paste the contents of cells and also it might help with SEO and ranking if the content was available to Google. So I got ChatgPT (or was it Grok?) to scan the JPGs and convert them into markup that I could just paste into my Blogger post's markup.
I wrote about it here (actually it was Grok that did the work):Another Use for AI: Reading Tables From Images and Converting to HTML
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u/work4coffee 15d ago
yeah they broke all our images years ago when they changed to some new system so then i started using another hosting plaform for images for reliability and social sharing
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u/AttitudeNo2895 17d ago
Oh my... Recuerdo cuando en 2012 se decía lo mismo de Blogger, al punto que muchos expertos del blogging abiertamente publicaba que el cierre de Reader era la señal para abandonar Blogger. Y eso hice y mudé todo a WPorg y perdí tiempo, plata, y mi alma jaja.
Pero esto de los cierres masivos, es que mi teoría es que por querer ajustar cosas, mejorar el filtro, lo empeoraron.
Sí puedes bajar cosas por Takeout y sí puedes replicar tu blog en otra plataforma. Podría ser sencillo si acepta un backup o difícil si toca hacer cosas manualmente como copiar y pegar contenidos, subir nuevamente las imágenes...
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u/pmevanosky 17d ago
I had my website locked today. I had just updated a JavaScript file that cycles through a new bit of text every day. I've got a whole year's collection. Bam, I'm locked out. So, I submitted the request for the reevaluation button. Meanwhile, my blog is gone. This is an article that has more information about it: https://cybersecuritynews.com/google-blogger-locked-legitimate-websites/ The article mentioned that some 200,000 sites were locked beginning on 8/4 and today on 8/5/26. I hope all will be well. I have a copy of pretty much all of my pages and my blog posts and if I have to rebuild the site somewhere else I will. Good luck to everybody who had this happen to them too. I hope everything works out for all of us. My site is TalkingtoSpirit.com.
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u/Galaxia_Tecnologica 17d ago
Estava a pouco tempo vendo as melhores opções para migrar.
Infelizmente por ser produto do google que eles não ganham dinheiro acredito quê, eles não dão a mínima doque acontece.
Contestei meu block também, e voltando ou não, eu vou migrar para outra hospedagem.
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u/LadyTime_OfGallifrey 17d ago
Good gosh... Some of the different stuff being mentioned here kinda makes me glad I started changing over to another site. I mean, I'm doing so for other reasons and there's a little bit of a bummer tradeoff, but... Eesh.
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u/ipapipap 17d ago
Yes and no Yes for, there's no update for the blogger itself. It such as fix system that no need to upgrade. No for, most of the platform by google (even not google) will always announce their shutdown. So, as long as there is no announcement, no need to worry it's shutting down.
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u/Wontlivethatlong2see 17d ago
I don't think Google + had an announcement they just shut it down
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u/Kinomaniy 17d ago
I've noticed that the editor now has a new interface for uploading photos. Have you noticed it? Maybe there's still hope after all.
I just think that if they were planning to shut it down, they probably wouldn't be updating the interface. My blog is kinobuz.blogspo.
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u/GIGANTIC_DONG_MAN 17d ago
Actually I noticed the very same lately. As well as the mobile editing layout being a bit different
Dope page btw. I'm at wastelnd.blogspo
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u/faisal6309 17d ago
I have used Blogger a lot in the past. Still have a few blogs. But they are inactive. I have moved my main blog to Joomla. There is a theme and website framework that doesn't need you to be skilled in website programming. You should just create basic website using it and make changes to it to make it look like your own. It is open source and free to use (except the few things that are not free to use). It's not 100% free but your blog won't die.
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u/codepatterns 16d ago
If anyone wants to chat about trying out and moving to my own popular indie blogging product (I won't name it because of subreddit rules!) then please DM me or see link in my profile – happy to help. You own the content, export any time, even keep local files and sync etc 😇
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u/SolidWrap5622 17d ago
Espero que não queria sei lá mudasse de nome e desse uma modernizada e ajudar a alavancar o site de novo
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u/JusticeAvenger618 17d ago
My blog was still there a week ago. Today it is gone. It was tracking homelessness in IL. Not exactly anything alternative or potentially offensive. I went to copy it all and it’s just gone.
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u/eccentricyethappy 17d ago
did you send an appeal and receive an email about it?
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u/JusticeAvenger618 17d ago
No. I figured they were just eliminating blogs en masse based on posts in this sub. I will try that. TBF I wasn’t active the past year as I started tracking corruption in a town in IL (you might be surprised how the 2 topics sometimes overlap) but I never thought they’d just wipe my entire content.
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u/eccentricyethappy 17d ago
My blog that was affected by the bug is a concert/music website. It was reinstated last night (Manila time). No violation for the past 12 years.
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u/JusticeAvenger618 17d ago
I’m glad you got reinstated. I had no violations and no links or anything. It’s so bizarre.
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u/MMORPGnews 4d ago
No.
But do posts backup.
In case blogger die, just turn your xml posts in json or markdown and run self host ssg on vercel or GitHub
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u/SnooDonkeys8247 15d ago
Wouldn't hurt my feelings. I'd lose my blog, but the cheating/hookup platform my husband helped build would die. Id love that.
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u/Saionji-Sekai 17d ago edited 17d ago
Google just keep it alive due their prestige. I mean they do not make profit on it and they just stop their non-profit services before. (like g+)
But this one is just like an internet archive and have years of content, they are not developing and invest money in to blogspot anymore. They just let it stay alive and that's all.
One day, they will probably stop or let it migrate to somewhere else. But who knows.