Blog Post Rescue Mission

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I posted recently about how, despite there being a great opportunity, blogs seem to remain a niche information source. I mentioned the LawProfs network, which hosted a couple of blogs I followed (Academic Success, and so on), as coming to the end of its life. I had reached out to one of the blogs to offer technical assistance in case they wanted to move but there seemed to be uncertainty about direction. So I was delighted to read a short time later that the LexBlog network had received exports or otherwise scraped the network prior to the Typepad shutdown.

While I am glad that all of those posts have been saved, it exposes yet again the issue of putting your eggs in someone else’s basket (which Kevin O’Keefe also discusses). If the blogs are revived on LexBlog, at least they’ll be operating on a platform with a business model focused on blog publishing in the legal market. In other words, LexBlog knows what they are getting into and even a dormant blog is likely to remain accessible.

Getting Out

The good news is that most blogging platforms are easy to export content from. A number of high-profile authors have left Substack and moved to Patreon. I was not that surprised, given Substack’s sullied reputation. But for those people who make all or part of their living off their writing and content, it can be a bigger risk. When a platform like Substack changes its priorities or strategic direction, it can undermine the decision points that led to someone to start using the platform initially. Technically, moving subscriber account data to a new platform is easy but getting the people to move themselves is harder.

I have to admit, I was surprised that the Law Prof blogs were owned by “Law Professor Blogs LLC” and not by the contributors of the content. Considering that these were all law school professors, I’m surprised if their arrangement was that they traded copyright for hosting. It makes you wonder why law schools didn’t pick up that slack and host collaborative blogs, something that seems ideal for a law library to lead. But it explains why it wasn’t obvious how to move posts out before the underlying technology failed.

At the same time, a platform eliminates a lot of the technical learning curve that might otherwise be an obstacle to blogging. The ability to spin up your own WordPress.com or even over on Blogger.com without anything more than a user name and a password is appealing. As you add more layers—subscribers, email newsletters, subscriber-only content or paywalls—the complexity can become a distraction from just wanting to write on the web.

Any blogger should have a plan to migrate. You never know when you are going to need it. This is especially true for publishing platforms but it matters even for self-hosted blogs. Migration could be necessitated by changes like those made by Substack, poor technical support, or cost containment. If your audience is built around people who are using Medium or Substack and you happen to be on those platforms, and then you move, that audience may not move with you.

Host Your Own

It is not reasonable to expect everyone to host their own content but I think that the ideal is to be closer to that end of the spectrum than to be on a commercial publisher’s platform. At the very least, anchoring your blogging presence around your own domain name seems key. One challenge for a lot of the Law Prof blog authors is that their blogs were sub-sites of the Law Prof root, which itself didn’t even use a solo domain name: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/academic_support, https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/adoption_law/, and so on. If the Business Law Professors want to make a switch in the future, they have their own domain name (https://businesslawprofessors.com ) and can move hosts without anyone losing track of them. They’re on WordPress, so they can spin up their own hosted service or have someone host them.

A domain name is, from a cost and technical perspective, the easiest to manage. My domain name renewal is about $10 a year. There’s an annual address verification but otherwise nothing technical happens. If I move platforms or website hosts, I have to point the domain name to the new site. That happens about once every three years.

At the very least, anyone wanting to get into blogging and creating content should consider a domain name. Then, even if you end up on a platform that is hosting your content for you and providing technical support, you can maintain control over the address of your content. It immediately loosens the grip of any underlying platform on your content.

Website hosts have figured out that they can compete on this spectrum. You can subscribe to what is called WordPress hosting with many website hosting companies. I am not really sure what this means, because I always get normal shared hosting and then run WordPress and I don’t seem to miss out on any features. I mean, WordPress is what it is. You can get started with a WordPress blog simply enough and at a low price point.

I pay about $5 per month at the moment. I find that I need to switch every few years and, similar to legal publishing contracts, it’s usually better to lock in for a few years. If I stay on this plan after my three year term, it’ll jump to $15 per month. Since I do not monetize this site, I try to keep the costs manageable. I’m comfortable paying up to about $200 a year, all-in, for website-related costs. I’ve always figured that’s probably about what other people pay for their streaming services or cable TV. I have seen a number of non-profits and law libraries pay a lot more than that for website hosting and I think they can probably find some significant recurring savings by being a bit more deliberate about their needs.

I’ve gotten better at the migrations over the years, including occasionally on my own home server. I’m not sure that’s a cost effective option unless you have a lot of technical know-how. The reality is that you will either spend more up front for reliable hardware or you’ll spend more in time than if someone else hosts it for you. The more you migrate, the easier it becomes to work through a checklist of steps. A lot of website hosting companies will also provide migration services and there are free plugins that will, once you’ve installed WordPress on a new server, import the contents of your existing WordPress site. I made my last migration in a matter of a few hours, really just the time it took to copy the files from one place to another and to upload the SQL database files, exported from the old site and imported into the new.

I used Automattic’s JetPack for a long time and it has subscriber management. But that is tied to WordPress accounts and so, when I dropped JetPack, I had to find an alternative and import my subscribers. In hindsight, I think the answer is to either use your own subscriber management—I use the Newsletter plugin for WordPress now for subscriptions and email newsletters—or to use a wholly distinct subscriber platform, like Beehiiv or even ConstantContact. Your newsletter doesn’t have to be tied directly to your blog, since it will be going out as an email anyway. I just wouldn’t want it tied to someone else’s publishing subscription system (like Substack or Medium or Automattic), where the audience is captured by the publisher, not you.

It is funny to me how integral email remains to all of this. We can spin up as many platforms as we want, and complain about how many emails we get each day, but it remains the best way to roust your audience. I like the newsletter—I think of subscribers to it as people who are more invested in my blog than the average drive-by Irish dancer—but am not sure it is a necessary feature except for those who are intent to grow their blog audience.

At the end of the day, blogging is, for many people, just a hobby, an outlet for writing or sharing ideas. Not every activity needs to be monetized or “grown” into anything more than it is. At the same time, hobby does not mean not deliberate. I hope that, if the Law Prof bloggers get back in the saddle, they will be thinking how to make their content available for the long term, regardless of which platform it sits on.