Perpetuity

 

 

I received a pandemic-related artist grant from the state early this year. One of the components of the grant proposal was to update my website (not this blog) to contain all aspects of my creativity in one place. This is proving to be more difficult than I imagined. My website is "owned" by the company Squarespace. Squarespace allows blog import, a feature they tout, but you cannot import individual posts. Pictures are not sized, formatted or placed properly. Captions will be gone. One must go into each post (I have over 2000) to correct every format problem. Images do not populate as thumbnails, so that only new posts written and populated with images on Squarespace show as thumbnails on the third challenge -the index. 

Blogger allows for simple indexing on the left column -you can see it here by scrolling down. By date, by tag, whatever. Squarespace only allows an index-type page called a summary block (on a separate page) that can be populated with only 30 posts. It is on that page that the nifty thumbnails of each post do not show unless I repopulate each post with an image from my computer. Because the summary block only allows 30 posts, I have to create a batch tag for each group of 30 posts, input the tag into each post, and do this roughly 60 times to create the index for the blog imported to Squarespace.

So then I think -what happens when Squarespace goes bankrupt, sells, or otherwise says they're not offering this service any longer? Well- I have to start from scratch. You cannot export the content: all images, text, captions, titles, blog posts or anything from Squarespace. 

It seems to me that what I have created in my time on this planet will only live on in this virtual space -at least as long as there is electricity and money to keep the website live. But how do we keep our existence in virtual space around far into the future? Is it worth it? Are there better ways to be spending one's time? 

Probably.