Why You Should Avoid Blogger.com like a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Blogger.com is like your rich and slightly neurotic girlfriend Julie’s house: Great for visits, bad place to live.

When you live there, at first it’s a storybook! She pays for everything, lets you live there rent free, makes it easy for you to do what you want, and you can just keep adding stuff to your room. Everybody is so happy they don’t even consider reading the terms and conditions. Just sign them, you love that girl!

One day, you decide it’s time to get a new couch. You find a great deal on a dual-reclining model, and the store even delivers it to your place. Oddly, as it comes in the door, your loving girlfriend insists (mumbling something about you having agreed to it) on using a branding iron to sear “Julie loves Jason” on the wooden leg. A little weird, but also kinda cute, and you do love Julie, so why not? After all, she’s letting you live in this awesome house, rent-free.

Over time, each new piece of furniture gets that same treatment. She goes back and marks all the stuff you brought in from before you even knew her. She’s so cute and quirky.

But, inevitably, feelings change. You’re just not that into how things are working out, and you need some space. After a big fight, Julie offers to let you have all your stuff.

The only problem is that now each individual item has been lovingly branded. Yes, you have a large pile of your stuff, but it’s gonna take some work to get it to look right.

Blogger dot Com is even worse than a crazy ex-girlfriend. Click To TweetThats where this metaphor begins to fall apart: blogger.com is even worse than Julie, because blogger gives you incorrect permalinks. That is like Julie going and changing your contact info in all of your friends’, acquaintences’, and colleagues’ phones, while disconnecting your phone service and confiscating your laptop.

Now all of a sudden it’s not only that you have to sand and paint a couch leg, you have to find the couch and prevent every visitor to your new place from instinctively sitting in the flowerpot where the couch used to be.

I’m getting all tied up in metaphors now, and your couch is about to have a phone number, so I’ll stop.

Suffice it to say that yes, free blogging services like blogger.com do technically let you keep your content. They just make it tough to actually do anything with it, once you take that data to its new home.

Do yourself a favor, and don’t let things get serious between you and blogger.com. And if you already have, and you’re ready to break things off, call me. I can get your stuff to its new home, and I know exactly how to deal with Julie.

It’s not you, it’s her.