Beginning to Migrate (some) Content to the NEW Doug Alone

I have had the idea since early on in this blog to possibly move it from this sort of hosted/third-party set-up to something more owned by me. This past week, I started to make this a reality:

https://www.dougalone.com

There are a lot of reasons behind this but let us start with caveat. I have exactly one real complaint about Blogger/Blogger and otherwise most of the decisions are about my creative process itself. 

The One Real Complaint

The newer Blogger themes tend to be plenty responsive as they are but there is still some degree of back-end handling that tries to serve up a "mobile-friendly" version of the page [note, this is based on looking into the errors and messages sent, I could be wrong]. This is the exact same page but Google, itself, treats this as a website trying to share multiple copies of the same content and basically passes this off as a reason to not index the site. 

After over a year of having the Google-product blog submitted to Google, and trying to go through their recommended steps, the issue persists to this day. Other search engines pick it up, but the fact that a Google-owned website has a mechanic that prevents it from being indexed by Google irks me. Just on a general "old man rants at clouds" level of irk. 

The Non-Complaint Reasons

tl;dr: I want more creative ownership and more technical freedom of my project.

As said, most of the other reasons having little do with complaints except tangentially. Blogger/Blogspot has been fabulous for a place for me to launch a fairly niche product and get it out and share some content/links but also just jam out and play my solo rpgs. If you want a blog and don't want to have to fitz with it a lot to make it functional, I'd say you might very well be well-served to use the platform. It was such a pleasurable experience it made me get back into blogging for the first time in years.

There is a large part of me that simply needs this degree of a passion project [no adverts or patreon or anything to pay me for my time and hosting fees or to play/review the products that show up] to be more self-owned. I want it to live or die by my decisions, not because of elements I am ultimately having to work around.

There are times where I want to share files, documents, or make pages/content that simply does not work in the current blog format. I have used Google Drive in the past but this seems to be the reason my blog one time got flagged for linking to off-site content. 

With images, I like to use a lot of images and have some become themes across posts and now that I am approaching around 500 images in, the back-end on this site is a bit clunky [though working well enough] but I like the idea of having even more creative control over that. There have been times where I have decreased my image count in posts simply to avoid the bloat. Before I decided to go ahead and switch over, I was thinking of getting a new site just to act as an image handler of sorts.

I have already used Javascript, building up some HTML shenanigans, CSS-overrides, and other little tools to bring about some things I consider pretty integral to the experience I want to share. The new blog is a "self"-hosted Wordpress site [hosted on a secure server I am leasing because the internet here would likely struggle to stay stable] so it still has some "package" elements but it becomes a lot easier for me to simply build a page in html and serve it up from another folder. To upload PDFs to a file folder. To make sort interactive content that can be used to add and build upon the play reports and such.

Wordpress also just has a lot more tools for handling certain aspects that I like. For now. Is it the best for what I want to do? I don't know. I'm not 100% sure there is a best. It is just a well-known beast with a lot of support. The relative simplicity of Blogger/Blogspot gave me the time and energy to try out and find out what I like, but what I like is just a bit more complicated.

Keep in mind that I am already having to work some of those old tricks just to get Wordpress where I like it, heh. I'm incorrigible.

Am I worried about [entity] using this blog for AI or censoring this blog in the future? Not really. I suppose such things are possible but if that is in this decision, it is somewhat minor.

The Great "Divorce"

tl;dr: a technical glitch means it will take a lot longer than realized to actually bring over everything, so some things will be cleaned up and left here with a new name.

The next step is something a bit more nuanced. When I first started THE GREAT IMPORT project, it involved the idea of moving 100% of the content from this blog to the new one. Then a wrinkle showed up and made me rethink. 

The "wrinkle" was that the import brought over all of the reader-visible text, most of the HTML back-end, and some of the pictures. It left a lot of the custom formatting broken or incomplete. The section-break style tags to link to portions of the post are largely deleted [to clear empty anchors, I assume] and classes not built into the theme I was using seem to have been stripped. I can understand the logic behind both decisions but this means for every post I copy over I have to 

1. Take the HTML from this blog
2. Rewrite it in a way that moves the tags into other HTML elements
3. Make sure the classes match the current [less a problem]
4. Update the links to the new blog [had to do anyhow]
5. Get the images used into a place
6. Add in the sections and the html sort of one-by-one. 

Even in fairly optimal speed/efficiency, it can take half an hour per post. More if any further glitches show up. At 160ish posts, that puts me at putting in 80 hours. I'm not going to "full time job" it so it would take weeks. 

While contemplating whether I just wanted to work out this out bit-by-bit, I realized despite my notion of wanting to increase ownership of my stuff it could be fitting to leave some content here while moving some of the new content over there. Blogs are kind of like tattoos. They are not necessarily permanent but sometimes keeping them around is a testimony to your past self. In cases where you need or want to forget your past self, it can be good to clear them out. In cases like this, there are elements that are so tied into who I was and how I was making it that I like the idea of leaving this breadcrumb behind. 

This I am beginning the process of separating The Doug Alone [meaning the new blog] from The Doug Alone Prologue [this one] which will act as at least a temporary collection of my journeys in solo roleplaying prior to the move. Sort of...

Who Gets What in The "Divorce"

tl;dr: Completed campaigns will stay behind for now while those campaigns/arcs that will be played out in the future will be migrated.

Campaigns that have been completely wrapped up and are not likely to be continued in their current form will remain part of the Prologue's legacy. 

The majority of the Fourth Wall Breaks that dealt specifically with the issues related to the blog in a this iteration will be left behind with the few that are more general being ported over with their original number intact.

A few reviews and incomplete campaigns [mostly thinking of the d100 one-shot and the unfinished English Eerie stuff] will remain here. 

A few of the more popular posts will remain unless they negate the next rule:

Stuff ongoing or more core to the future of "The Doug Alone Experience" will move. 

This means The GLOW and Bleak + Pearl will definitely all move. Ick + Humb will move. A lot of the solo musings, solo advice, and tools will move. The more about-type pages will move. 

The PROLOGUE will retain:

• The Bloody Hands arcs which is fitting since they are basically the root of the blog and a major core of why I started it. At one point, there was a slight chance that campaign was going to be the whole blog. 
• Gareth Hendrix and the Bunker Bigfoot which is one of my cherished babies but it was clearly an experimental piece that I would do fairly differently nowadays and is fitting for it to be here. 
• Eustace + Hitomi was a hard call but the core of that was a large factor of how I built up this blog and despite it being the second most personal piece [behind Gareth] it still feels better to leave it here. If I ever pick it back up, I might go through and move it over but we'll see. More likely, the new stuff would simply link to the old.
• Sinister Semester X was a playthrough/playtest and is by far the most popular post on this blog. It is also, again, a relic of me working out my style and I think it can stay behind as a tribute to the fun I had here.
• The incomplete d100 and English Eerie one-shot type sessions. Lars will 100% continue in his Ick + Humb variation but his origin story can remain behind. 
• A few rules, tools, and such that were more a relic-of-past-Doug. Things like solo news that has already past and done all it can do.
• Some posts will remain "up" but with a redirect link to their new home if I feel like it might help.

The Doug Alone will get:

• The GLOW which might wrap up after "vs The Kid" but I truly don't know. In principle, it is an original game world of mine that has a lot of possibility so I am bringing it along. Sure, the same can be said of the Alabama Weird but that's a bit different in that the latter is more a broad concept that greatly precedes the blog [my first Cresthill story was...years ago? decades? variations of it have gone back to the 90s]. 
• Bleak + Pearl which in some ways is right up there with The Hands as a cornerstone of this blog but still is maybe only half finished and I'd like to have it complete under one roof. 
• Ick + Humb. I mean, I never got around to actually playing any of it on the Prologue anyhow, which is one of my regrets.
• Most of the tools, musings, and such. I had always meant to post more. It will be case by case, for sure.
• It goes without saying, but stuff predicted to show up on this blog will now likely show up over there.

Is There a Timeline?

No. Not really. My hope is to spend an hour or so a day doing some of the background work necessary to handling it. Copy the HTML, confirm the images, get it up and running in the new blog. Change the links. Build the pages and infrastructure. Then come back and delete the moved content over. Finally rearranging this blog [The Prologue...the Problog...never mind] to reflect its new content. As said before, this ends up being about 2-4 posts per day so even if only half the posts move it could take me a month or two to finish. Likely longer since there will remain links and issues I find later as I go.

Will I Post New Stuff to this Blog [aka, the Prologue]? 

Probably not. There is a chance for all sorts of reasons. Like, if I get an itch to finish out the d100 recap or return to The Bloody Hands, it might show up over here. Still. probably not.  

I will keep an eye on comments and such and still correct stuff and potentially add in some commentary and such to existing posts to commemorate. 

So, if you are finding this weeks or years down the road and wonder where I have gone: hello, and welcome to a time capsule of who I was throughout 2024 and early 2025. Warts and all.

I have had an absolute blast.

PS: There Will Be Warts

Even at a casual glance, there are going to be posts left behind linking to posts that moved, etc. Apologies in advance because even after all is said in done, things are going to break.