On March 16, 2011 Windows Live Spaces is closing down. I started blogging there back in May 2005, and with the upcoming deadline I decided I should have a look at what I wrote in my younger days.
At first glance the blog seemed to be full of crap I wrote when as a teenager, but I was awfully surprised that I managed to post just over 100 entries until I gave up on the site in July 2006, but after digging a bit deeper I found a number of posts with some substance behind them.
Luckily, Microsoft has given users of the site a number of ways to save their data. The easiest option is migrating to a new blog hosted at WordPress.com – just click through the wizard, and all of your posts, categories and comments are moved across to WordPress, with Microsoft redirecting links to your old blog to the new address.
One nifty feature at WordPress is the ability to limit public access to the site: if you wish, you can block everyone except for yourself from reading it. Doing this is a simple “flick of the switch” in the administration panel – if you have a Windows Live Space you care even a little bit about, you have no reason not to migrate it over, just in case you ever want it again.
As for myself, while some of the content on my old blog I didn’t care too much for and didn’t want the world to ever see again, I didn’t want to lose it forever. For these reasons I chose to migrate my data to WordPress: my old posts are now hidden out of public view at http://marcusthomaswong.wordpress.com/, waiting until I have time to move the “good” posts over to this blog, which is a self-hosted WordPress installation running on my own web hosting account (I’ll describe the WordPress-to-Wordpress import process in an upcoming entry).
As for everyone else out there, if you have a blog over at Windows Live Spaces and want to save it, you had better get cracking: it is only two weeks to go until the site is closed forever!
[…] and gave users the option to migrate their content to a new blog hosted at WordPress.com – I did just that but archived all of the content, embarrassed to make public what I had wrote as a […]