Subtle background changes to the blog

Keen-eyed blog-sleuths may detect one or two subtle changes to my blog. Yes...the profile picture has changed, though it's still the usual me. But it's more subtle than that! If you look at my 'Complete Profile', you'll now see that not only has the number of profile-viewings suddenly reduced to very little, I'm said to have been on Blogger only 'since May 2011'. But some readers will know that isn't correct. I've been posting on Blogger since February 2009, and the 'Blog Archive' on the right edge of my main screen view does indeed show posts going back to that time.

So what have I done?

Well, I've rationalised my Google accounts. In February 2009 my internet was being provided by an outfit called Tiscali, a company long since taken over by a bigger fish in the communications industry. I had a picturesque email address - driftwoodbeach@tiscali.co.uk - and the blog was set up using that address. Later, in May 2011, I began to use Google's Chrome browser. I set it up with the Gmail address I had by then - lucymelford@gmail.com. That Gmail address became the name of my main Google account, and therefore the prime portal for everything provided to me by Google to my desktop PC, laptop, and (from 2012) my Android tablet and phone. Except the blog. That stayed where it was, at the old Tiscali address, which had become a secondary Google account.

As the years passed, having the blog in a separate account, set apart from the rest of my Google stuff, became more and more awkward. And occasionally it was a nuisance, when for instance I was away from home and for some reason I couldn't sign into driftwoodbeach@tiscali.co.uk address, even though lucymelford@gmail.com was readily available.

I began to wonder whether the blog might become orphaned at some point, should Google proceed with some rationalisation of its own, and wipe it all by design or blunder. I had of course a complete backup of every post in a long series of monthly Word documents, but copying the content of those into a brand new blog would be a truly monumental task.

I really wanted to shift the entire blog from the driftwoodbeach account to the main one. But I suspected that it wouldn't be easy.

I was both right and wrong. Wrong, because there is in fact a proper procedure for lifting a blog out of one Google account and dropping it into another. In principle, it's dead simple. But I was also right, because in practice it's tricky to carry out every straightforward little step without a daft slip-up. I got it correct on my ninth attempt.

What you have to do is get yourself (as the owner of another Gmail account) set up as co-author of the blog. You send an emailed invitation to yourself as the 'new' co-author (in my case at lucymelford@gmail,com), and accept it. The blog settings then show two author accounts, yourself as administrator of the blog, and yourself as the new co-author. You then swap the admin role to the new co-author account. She (that's myself at lucymelford@gmail.com) now acquires full admin rights - including control of what the blog looks like, and all final editorial control. And that's that. Getting the sequence of actions absolutely correct, in order to achieve this end, wasn't so easy. But it's done.

So now everything is conveniently handled by one Google account.

The driftwoodbeach@tiscali account is redundant. I won't delete it yet, just in case I still haven't quite made a mistake-free blog transfer. And I may never delete it, as it might be useful to have an established but 'empty' account ready for some other use. No doubt, however, I will get a message at some point from Google, warning me that they will automatically bin that old account if it remains unused for more than six months.

Will readers notice any practical difference? I don't think so.

If anybody wants to delve into what I was writing years ago, they still can. It's all still there. But, you know, human nature being what it is, I suspect that nobody does. Nor ever will, not unless I become infamous for some unforeseen reason.

Sequel
I've deleted the old driftwoodbeach account. My phone wouldn't show me the new Gmail-account version - only the old one, and yet wouldn't sign me out of it. So it had to go. I deleted it from the laptop, and everything then defaulted to the Gmail account, including what I saw on the phone.

Goodbye driftwoodbeach. At least, goodbye in Googleland.