Tuesday, February 24, 2015

The Great (TG) Migration

Hello all,

No caption today. As you may have heard if you follow any number of TG Captioning blogs closely, Blogger is planning on making all blogs containing sexually explicit material (ergo most, if not all, TG blogs) private. This leaves many captioners with two choices: maintain their blog privately amongst those who take the time to ask to be invite to the private site, or find a new site to continue posting their work.

In regards to the first option, I can actually envision a very small portion of captioners who might appreciate the option of a private blog - bloggers looking for interaction are more likely to get it from people who have to request access to a site. However, I personally believe that it is counter-intuitive to continue utilizing a site (in this case Blogger/Google) that clearly doesn't want to cater to your interests. Moreover, I think the TG captioning community thrives thanks in large part to anonymous viewers. I believe that most would be dissuaded from participating if they were required to request access to a private TG blog; thus, it seems that this option is not a feasible one.

The other option therefore is to move sites - WordPress and Tumblr seem to be the most popular options mentioned at the moment (although if anyone has other ideas, please share!). I'm still undecided at what to do - I do have a Tumblr page that I haven't updated in ages, but like others have noted I question the ease of interactivity via comments/the set style of posting that would force a large overhaul for the way I do things. At the moment my plan is to start uploading all of my caps from this blog to Tumblr so they will have a permanent location somewhere, while separately I try and decide where I want to start posting new caps.

This brings me to my next point, which I think is the most important of them all - how are we (as captioners and viewers in the TG caption community) going to maintain contact during this period of transition? I can easily imagine smaller sites, many of which have wonderful individual captions, disappearing and their quality work vanishing forever. Bigger sites will also have the trouble of trying to repost their content in a new, visible location. Finally, how we all link back to each other again? The current system of links via caption blogs may not completely evaporate but will likely be severely reduced. How can we ensure that this change doesn't result in the loss of many quality caps/stories?

Although I'm sure there will be more intelligent options than this, I will start posting links to new locations for old sites as soon as I find them. I ask that if you are a captioner who is moving from Blogger, a viewer who knows a captioner switching over to a new site, or even a good source of images that will disappear - PLEASE send links to ElenaStarz4372@gmail.com. I hope to start compiling these links in order to ensure that I (and whatever viewers read this) still maintain contact with members of this wonderful community.

Love always,
Elena Starz

1 comment:

  1. Hi, I've just relocated my own blog Degraded Damsels to wordpress. I was able to import all of my posts (including comments) from blogger to the new wordpress blog. You might prefer doing the same, rather than trying to reupload all of your own caps to Tumblr or elsewhere. The import only took a few minutes once I set it up, and apparently is entirely automatic.

    I'm not entirely happy with the new blog, it doesn't seem nearly as customizable as blogger was, but it seems better than Tumblr. And it didn't take too long to set up either. There also appears to be a widget on wordpress that is the same as blogger's blog list widget, or similar enough to serve the same need.

    Mind you, I'm still just starting to learn my way around wordpress, so take what I say with a grain of salt. :-)

    - B-Rex, https://degradeddamsels.wordpress.com/

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