Decisions, Decisions . . .

The Smallest Minority began almost seven years ago - May 14, 2003. I started on Blogspot because, well, it was there, it was free, and it was easy. Shortly afterward, I picked Haloscan to provide comment service because Blogspot didn't offer one, and the previous service I had selected sucked wind. Again, Haloscan was there, was free, and was easy. Then I picked Imagestation as a photoserver, but that didn't work out too well, so I eventually switched to Photobucket. Again, at the time Blogspot didn't offer the service.

As time went on, I elected to pay a small amount annually to improve the comments (longer comments allowed, as some of my readers are nearly as long-winded as I am) and for sufficient bandwidth with Photobucket to support the traffic I was drawing. Overall, I think this blog costs me something like $50 a year, tops.

Over the years, Blogspot has gotten to be more reliable and have more functions. It now offers commenting and has a photoserver - and it's still free. Photobucket works very well.

But commenting? Not so much.

In December, Haloscan transitioned to Echo. I had very little choice other than to go along, as Haloscan's archives exported in a format that does not easily transfer to any other system I've found, and at the time I had nearly 40,000 comments in the archives.

Trust me, those comments are every bit as valuable to me as the posts they are linked to.

So in December the Great Migration began, and lo, the comments transferred successfully!

But if I export my Echo comments now, A) the export doesn't work properly, and B) the comments that export now go only back to December, 2009. Further, Echo seems to suck in the extreme. I have had NUMEROUS comments (as noted below) on the general suckitude of Echo, and now one entire comment thread doesn't work, or at least it only works in Internet Exploder. I, as the owner of the blog, cannot access those comments from Echo's moderation page. They will not load. And Echo doesn't really have site support.

So yes, Echo SUCKS.

And also, since January, Blogger now paginates all of its blogs. I used to archive my blog monthly. If you called up say, April 2005, you got every post for that month on one page. Now you get about the last 20 for that month. Want to see what I wrote on April 1? You're SOL. So I have to switch my archiving to weekly. It seems a minor issue, but I back up my blog on my home computer. Doing it weekly is a PITA.

So here we are. People have been telling me (literally) for years to get off of Blogspot. But there are dozens of blogs out there linking to right here. There are posts I have written still drawing significant traffic from those other blogs. I don't want those links broken. I very much want my comments to WORK, but also I want them to come along with me if I move. A lot of my posts link to earlier posts of my own, and I want THOSE links to work.

I'm stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

At this point, I don't have much of a reason to leave Blogger, but every reason to want to dump Echo. Any suggestions? (Assuming Echo will work?)