A Painful Lesson in Platform Ownership
Regular readers of Search Advisory have no doubt noticed a slew of changes over the past few weeks. In 2009, this blog was hosted by TechLINKs, who moved it to TAG last summer when TechLINKs changed their business model. For a variety of reasons I won’t go into, TAG recently stopped hosting blogs on their platform. I found this out on the Friday prior to the Sunday that I was leaving for two weeks of conference travel. I had already publicized the fact that I’d be live blogging these events, and I had published links to where readers would be able to find my coverage.
Due to the changes at TAG (which, I must tell you, were outside of their control, and they were very cooperative with me throughout the transition)…not only would these links go dead while I was gone, all 145 posts I had published over the past year or so would disappear into a black hole.
While I could have panicked, I didn’t. I contacted my superb web developer, Luiz Varanda at ReasonLabs, and he got started building my own blog – that I would own – right away. I also got a friend to copy and paste all 145 posts (over 50,000 words total) into Word so we could capture them before they vanished forever.
Once the blog was all set up, my friend copied and pasted the posts back into the pages you see here. This was more complicated than any of us had anticipated – he had to make decisions about categories and tags, and he had to change the dates to the original date of each post. Recreating comments wasn’t very do-able, so for the most part, we let those go. And the biggest unanticipated glitch was the plethora of links I had included in my posts – they didn’t transfer over. So those have all been recreated by hand, one by one.
In the meantime, readers have visited broken links (which can’t exactly help our reputation as smart Internet marketers), time has been spent (by three people), money has been spent, and a painful lesson has been learned. If you’re publishing content…if you’re creating something of value online…be sure you own your own content as well as the platform on which it is published. If you don’t control the site on which your words appear, they could disappear without warning, or at the very least, cause you to jump through unnecessary hoops to save them.
