Oh, oh, looks like Six Apart’s Vox.com is closing its door. Another free blogging service bites the dust. I have been using Vox.com for mobile blogging since 31/Aug/2008 or roughly for about two years. And what a coincidence the date I sign up was on Malaysia Merdeka Independence day! The end of the free blogging service seemed rather timely as around June this year, I was already planning to migrate to another mobile blogging platform, namely blog by using Google Blogger. Six Apart made the closing announcement just after the Merdeka day this year and informed that the Vox blogging service will end on 30th Sept 2010.
Using Vox.com
I signed up with Vox because Vox provided a Palm software for my Palm Centro mobile phone. The Palm Vox software was very easy to use and works very well with the Palm Centro camera to make quick mobile photo blogs. Despite the 1.3 megapixel digital camera of Palm Centro churns out fairly decent pictures, it was good enough to make quick mobile blogs on the go!
The only downside with Vox, the blog post are pretty much sand boxed by Google and other search engines. IE if you didn’t join any community and make friends with people within the Vox blogging platform, your blogs are largely ignored.
In addition, my URL with Vox uses the Vox subdomain. I could not plug it in with my own personal domain unlike Tumbler and Blogger Blogspot and thus all the posting will not show to search engines that there are constant updates in my domain. In the point of search, constant updates and fresh content means that your website is alive and kicking. Enough website activities to warrant keeping your website in their radar for search listing.
Migrating Blog Post from Vox to Other Blogging Platform
Since I didn’t want to just throw away all 219 posts and 134 photos that I posted to Vox for the last 2 years, and I didn’t want to migrate to another Six Apart free blogging platform like TypePad, I decided to export / import them to my WordPress blog. Initially I was thinking of exporting the posts to Blogger but the procedure to do so was more complicated requiring exporting the Vox post into somekind of XML format, then importing it to Blogger.
Importing the posts from Vox to WordPress was easier. All you needed to do was to download a Vox import plugin plus a class-wp-importer plugin, activate them and key in your Vox ID, URL address and password, and let the plugin does it job. Piece of cake!
Cleaning up the category and tags though was a little more tedious. Perhaps there was a plugin somewhere out there to help out, but I decided to do it the tedious way of re-categorizing and tagging each post manually one-by-one. Took me the better part of half a day to do it. It was rather tedious plus a laggy Firefox interface hampered my effort. Could have been a memory leak somewhere. Felt a bit lazy to reboot the PC so I Just kept at it till it was all done.
So now my blog has now burgeoned up from the import, well the number of blog post has increase, but in terms of words it is actually not so many. You can’t really do long-winded blog writing in your teeny-weeny mobile phone, although my mobile did have a QWERTY keyboard which helps to kick up some nice short blurbs with pictures to tell the story for the moment too!
For now, with the death knell of Vox.com, my de facto mobile blogging on the go will be posted to Blogger either using my handy dandy new Android enabled Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro while keeping my main WordPress blog for longer article post.