After poking and prodding the capabilities of Micro.blog for the past 18 months, I have decided to consolidate my online writing on Wordpress where I’ve kept a blog for more than a decade.
This wasn’t an easy decision. Micro.blog is an innovative, capable, affordable service run by a smart, conscientious entrepreneur. It balances simplicity and power like no other blogging platform.
I’m always curious about why a blogger leaves a certain platform and moves to another. In case this is helpful to others, I’m sharing why I am making this change.
The main reason centers around reading tools. Almost 90% of what I posted on Micro.blog relates to books. Micro.blog has some good reading support, but can’t display thumbnail images of covers within posts or allow links from the bookshelf back to the post about the book. I tried many workarounds, but I could never find a solution that made sense. Wordpress, with all its complexity, made this pretty easy. Here’s a link to my bookshelf with the functionality in Wordpress I wasn’t able to implement in Micro.blog.
Further, I’m feeling less and less inclined to share or participate in social platforms of any kind. I am weaning myself off of anything with a time-sensitive feed, including even wholesome ones like Micro.blog. I prefer the more timeless approach of blogs, where the reader and the writer meet only when the time is right — through a fortuitous web search, a Sunday afternoon RSS digest, or a friendship forged in the ether through common interests.
Finally, I have a long history of writing and interacting with readers on Wordpress. Consolidating everything to Micro.blog would mean losing hundreds of comments over the years. For me, this felt like too great of a loss.
A quick word about how long posts and short posts coexist on Wordpress. I worried that a consolidated blog would see my longer essays overwhelmed by the avalanche of short posts. I solved this by creating a subdomain for shorter posts (blog.robertbreen.com), while continuing to publish essays and longer posts at robertbreen.com. This keeps the two types of posts segregated, yet still allowing seamless navigation for the reader. I like how it all came together.
While I won’t post here again, I will keep tabs on the many bloggers I met on Micro.blog through my RSS reader — please keep writing! And I tip my cap to Manton Reece, whose brilliance and heroics have provided an incredible voice and platform for so many.
