Monday, November 24, 2014

A Fine Squidoodle-Dee--Doo... and Emily Bronte, Too

Do all things come to an end -- or at least transformed beyond the point of loved recognition? 2014 has seen the end of Squidoo and the transfer of featured content to Hubpages. I never wanted to see that day.

I opted to let a majority of my pages make the transfer... not all. Prior to that point, I had never deleted a lens. (Not for practical reasons in many cases, and not because of the hours of work that I invested, but because those pages get personified.) But in that short time frame we were granted, I saved, took screen shots, and hit delete on many, bawling away. All of them are to be resurrected someday, many are to find their home on Wizzley -- when I find the time.

It was an exhausting couple days. One poetry page that was supposed to make the move got deleted -- after I saved it, yes, but before I got its little mug shot. When I tried to do the screenshot, I got the 'green monster surprise' pictured here. As my mother would have said, "Well, that's a fine Squidoodle-dee-do."

The poetry lenses that made the move have their own tribulations. There is a policy on Hubpages that one can have a maximum of two links to any site that's not whitelisted. Flickr is okay, but Audioboo -- whoops, now the site is Audioboom -- isn't. Most of the poetry pages that transferred had more than two links to hosted audio content and thus transferred with warnings.

YouTube is largely unfamiliar terrain. The short fix is to centralize the audio elsewhere. Evening Nigh's 'sister blog' Audio Reflections is planning to do most of the hosting. Here, though, is the audio for Emily Bronte poems:


I plan to do a lot more writing here. Self-consciousness and guilt about being away so long can make it hard to return.