Several years ago I used to post most of my articles here (and on XDA, of course). When Google Plus became a thing, I primarily posted there, as I quite liked the platform. I was always a bit distrustful of its longevity, but even though many have been openly negative towards it, it still seemed to be used by a lot of people - especially in tech communities.

Just to compare, I have 160k followers on Twitter, and 460k on G+; almost triple, so it doesn't seem like such a barren wasteland to me. The actual reach seems similar, though. Nevertheless, Google gonna Google, and G+ is shutting down over the next few months. So I decided to go back to posting here.

My posts here will undoubtedly have less visibility than they did on G+, but I am barely involved with public/community projects any more so it won't make that big a difference in practice. I expect post frequency to be low, but when I do post something I'll link it on Twitter too. Short-term probably on G+ as well, for as long as it keeps going.

Even though the G+ content is outdated and probably of little interest today, I didn't want to lose it so I spent some time scripting to import the posts. It's curious how many things disappear from the 'net even though supposedly nothing ever does - some of my old stuff is like it never existed. So I wanted to preserve it, if for nobody else then just for me. Most of the posts and their comments are now available here. Formatting isn't perfect, some content and media may be lost, links may be dead, but it's mostly there.

This blog still has the layout of its previous incarnation - this is actually the 4th version in the 11 years I've been posting. It could use some more work but as I have no fondness for UI development and lots of other things to do, that's not a priority for me. I did redo the backend in its entirety, moving from PHP (ugh) to Python/Django (yay). Had to fight some of the components along the way (how does everything still not support 4-character utf-8 properly out of the box?), but it seems to mostly be working now. A lot of things could use some AJAXing up, but whatever.

Basic markdown has replaced the TinyMCE monstrosity, commenting is back (open for a month after post publication) for now, you can even +1 posts. Sign-in is by way of your Google account - only your comment/+1, Google-provided account ID, and name are currently stored. An RSS stream is no longer available, but if there's enough interest (I doubt it) I might bring that back.

All in all not too bad for about 16 hours of work, I think.