Flooded Lizard Kingdom

I am a Six Apart groupie.

By "groupie" I don't mean I make myself available for sex to the employees of the company. That would be weird. I also do not follow them around the country and attend all of their speaking appearances. That would be expensive.

But I love Movable Type. Love it. I love Six Apart (6A) because they made it and support it. I don't even remember how I found out about MT, but when I saw it, I knew I wanted that. I gave the nice 6A people $40 to install it for me, and I have spent the last few happy years making it do what I want. Usually. And when it doesn't, I believe it has a good reason.

Now I'm having a baby. We heard the heartbeat Wednesday morning. It was a respectable 160 bpm techno beat and we're quite pleased with that. Since my family and friends all over the country, I can't imagine not blogging about this kid. Some people make scrapbooks or write diaries. I blog.

However, I don't really want my mom wandering over to this blog on a regular basis. I make it a policy never to blog anything that I would be ashamed for her to see, but I don't always have the same conversations with her that I do with my friends. And she dislikes profanity, so I don't feel like she should be subjected to it, but I'm not willing to refrain in my own space.

I could just set up another MT blog. Easy enough. But despite much experimenting with existing options and then actual development work on C-Man's part, I have yet to find a satisfactory solution for managing photo albums in MT. If I'm going to post 1 or 2 photos at a time, it's fine. But what if I have 10 birthday photos, or 12 from a grandparent visit? I should probably cull and only post the good ones, but I want options.

Enter Vox. My beloved 6A launched Vox last year, as a "don't be afraid of blogging" platform that feels (to me) a lot like Blogger and LiveJournal. Compared to those services, though, it makes managing photos and video easier. Since my digital camera takes movies, I imagine we'll be taking some. Vox also has a lot of cute, easy templates. I have a Vox account so I can comment on other blogs there, so it would be easy to just...be...sucked...in...

Except.

What if Vox doesn't last? What if they change it and I don't like it anymore? What if if I need to move my content, but I can't extract all the data that I've spent so much time entering, editing, and organizing?

This fear is not without basis in reality. Take my experience with Blogger.

I started on Blogger. I grew out of Blogger. I exported to MT, and it was fairly easy, since it was back in the olden days and I had no comments, photos, or categories. When Grace wanted to move from Blogger to MT, I told her it would be easy. I thought it would take about 12 minutes. It took about two weeks, and Cody had to use a bunch of his ninj4 skillz, and I didn't tell Grace how many hours I spent on it or how many nights I stayed up until midnight until it finally came over correctly. She was terribly patient given the difference between my initial estimate and the time it actually took.

During one stage of trying to export her photos, we changed her from blogspot publishing to FTP publishing. It didn't help us get the photos - and it also locked her out of updating her blog. Permanently. Despite repeated pleas to tech support. Despite Blogger's own documentation that stated if you switched, your blogspot domain would eventually be unlocked and you could reclaim it. Eventually, she managed to get them to delete her old blog. So instead of going to the old blog and finding its new home, visitors get a 404.

Blogger (on blogspot) is free, so perhaps you get what you pay for.

Vox is free.

Flickr, the photo sharing site, is free for a basic account, but I think you can also pay them for an upgraded account. As far as I can tell, Flickr kicks ass. It has all the features I could ever want in a photo sharing site, and then some, and they keep adding more. It would take all the thought out of managing photos and albums, and I could easily post to MT. But if Flickr changed, and I didn't like it anymore, could I get my data out? People can comment on photos, could I get those comments out in a usable format?

Another complicating factor: Flickr is owned by Yahoo, a company which in my opinion has historically had the worst online help and the most atrocious customer service of almost any business I've ever encountered. - even when I was paying them money for their services. If I needed help from Flickr, would I be able to get it? I can't believe it given my history with Yahoo.

I almost want someone to argue me out of my paranoia. It would be so EASY to use Vox and/or Flickr. For a baby blog, I don't even think I need that level of control that I want with my other blogs. A pre-made template and an easy interface is probably just fine. I have enough work to do on other web projects.

But it gives me chills to think about going through what Grace and I went through with Blogger, when the content in question is a record of memories of my child's life.

What to do?