In December 2004 I made the decision to start a blog: it was Christmas, I didn’t have much to do at work, blogging was the hot new thing and since Mosha had just started one I thought I might as well too. I looked around for somewhere to host my blog and being a good Microsoft person I thought their new free blogging platform would be ideal; I started posting and quickly got hooked. 676 posts and six and a half years later here I am.
As you may have noticed I migrated my blog to WordPress today in response to last week’s news that Windows Live Spaces is being discontinued. I’m not sad about this and indeed had wanted to move my blog for several years, but up until this announcement there was no easy way to migrate away from the Live Spaces platform (MS have now provided a very smooth migration path); I could have started from scratch somewhere else but I didn’t want to lose my old posts and comments and break all the links to my blog that were already out there. Also, I’ll be honest and say that I was lazy and so long as my blog did what I wanted it to do – namely give me somewhere to post and hopefully drive some business for my consulting – then I was ok. I can already see I’m going to be much happier on WordPress though.
Now also seems a good point to sound off about the rubbish treatment I received over the years at the hands of Windows Live Spaces. It seems amazing but in the six years I used it it never got any better, and indeed got noticeably worse with each revision it received: functionality disappeared (including the ability to see any kind of statistics earlier this year) and UI changes made it much harder to find pages in the admin area. It’s services like this that have given MS the bad reputation it’s got today, and it pains me to say that as an MVP whose entire livelihood is built on MS being successful as a company. Why bother creating services and products if they’re just going to be a source of frustration for everyone that uses them, if you’re not going to commit the money and talent to developing them into serious competitors to whatever else is out there? MS should be concentrating on doing the things it does well (like SQL Server) rather than messing around in the world of social media; hopefully the death of Windows Live Spaces means that MS is going to start doing this in the future…
Nice post, thanks for the information. What is the main benefit over LiveSpaces you get from WordPress? I am using neither, our Blog is hosted at Blogger (http://flurfunk.sdx-ag.de), but I am interested in what the benefits of the alternatives are.
How did the migration affect your SEO results? Do you think you lost value through this? Or does LiveSpaces forward to your new host?
Thanks,
Nicolas
Well, to be honest Live Spaces only gave the bare minimum of functionality. Think of anything that you’d want from a blogging platform and Live Spaces didn’t do it! I’m still working out what’d there with WordPress though, there’s a lot to learn.
The good thing about the migration is that all of my Live Spaces URLs are now forwarded to WordPress. That’s very important for me, since I’ve got a lot of links out there.
It seems the transition was pretty seemless as well when I moved mine which I appreciated. I to am still going through everything that WordPress buttons and gadgets. I will say that right away, I am liking this place a lot better than the old place.
Could you bring back the list of link to other Blogs?
Thanks!