Importing an archive
On not quite abandoning Blogger
It was too easy, really, this process of automatically posting 500+ old book reviews onto my Substack.
I’d been writing on Blogger for more than 15 years before starting to explore Substack. When I started with Blogger, I’d mucked about with LiveJournal, but only barely, and not in any way that I felt compelled to hang onto. This time, I’d be leaving behind more than 700 posts, most of them book reviews, loosely speaking, and this felt wrong.
(I haven’t committed to abandoning Blogger. But I wasn’t enjoying it much, because mostly it felt like unproductive work, so I’m not sure whether I’ll go back.)
When I looked into importing from Blogger to Substack, all I had to do was provide a URL and click a checkbox attesting that I was entitled to import from that URL. I couldn’t find a way to automatically import only selected posts, unless it might’ve worked to rely on Blogger’s rickety Tags feature, so by default I just dragged everything over with me:
the seeingly most-read post, whose traffic was in part clearly bot-generated, about writer/physician Gabor Mate and addiction
actually the most-read post of all, about Occupy Wall Street in 2011
posts about my environmental humanities teaching, like my 2016 course on climate change in a settler-colonial environment, and
a startling number of commentaries on books, many of them from British Columbia and many of which I’ve loved, that I’m not sure just how many other people will ever read.
Frankly, I’m tempted to try importing someone else’s blog, just to see what would happen. It seems like it’d be an easy theft, and as a result I’m pretty confident that Substack will be the home of some faux earnest non-authors, in amongst all the rest of us.
Anyway: long story short, this stack now has close to 800 posts on it, but I’m not that productive. Once a week will probably be my target, though hopefully I’ll exceed that. Three Four books currently languish in my review queue, with the reading done and the note-taking in progress, so here’s hoping that the despair (Gaza, climate change, Canadian politics, American politics…) lifts often enough for that work to get done.