Thursday, June 17, 2021

Last Post Here: Moving From Blogger to WordPress

The Conversable Economist blog has been based on the Google Blogger platform for 10 years, since I started the blog in May 2011. However, this will be the last post here on Blogger. I am transferring the blog over to WordPress, at http://conversableeconomist.com. The 2500 or so archived posts from the last decade have been transferred over, too. All future posts will be added at that website.  

The proximate reason for the shift is that  Google made a decision to stop supporting Feedburner, which was the software that allowed people to sign up to receive emails about each post. I've got about 3,000 readers signed up to receive an email of each post, and I didn't want to lose them. I think that their names have been successfully transferred over to WordPress, but if you signed up in the last 2-3 weeks, it's possible that your name did not get added to the WordPress list.  If you stop getting emails about new posts, please go to the new home of the blog and sign up there. 

There are subsidiary reasons for the shift, as well, but it doesn't feel worth getting into the minutiae here. Overall, it feels to me as if WordPress has more features that are easier to access. 

One change perhaps worth noting is that I have added a "Donation" button at the upper right of the new site. Blogger has been free to use. WordPress is not particularly expensive, but it's not free, either. Also, my wife and I are paying for any sins we committed in  past lives with multiple years of college tuition purgatory. If you are in a financial position to make a donation, it would be a genuine help: in particular, it would help me stop thinking about moving the blog to a subscription model, and instead keep it freely available--which is my preference. 

Many thanks to Cameron Payne for her work in setting up the new home for the blog and for transferring the archives and mailing lists.