Why I am Going To Leave Squarespace

I have had a number of headaches with Squarespace — the blogging platform /Message is based on — but one is so persistently annoying that it is leading me to start the (terrifying) prosect of moving my blog once again. What is that headache? It is the lowly bookmarklet: the piece of javascript that all blog platforms provide so that a user can start a blog post based on a link to a specific web page being viewed, or perhaps selecting a fragment of text to respond to.

For reasons that escape me, Squarespace has been unable to create a bookmarklet that will copy selected text.

You might think this is a tiny tiny feature, not big enough to start thinking about porting a blog over to an alternative platform. But this is something I do all the time, nearly every single time I start a new blog post.

And I have been waiting for a resolution since I moved to Squarespace in January 2010.

I complained to the support team, who handed me over to the engineers. I got this response:

Hey Stowe,

Please understand that we receive hundreds of feature requests and have limited engineering resources.

We typically prioritize bugs that critically impact site performance or core functionality first, and this issue does not fall into that category.

Again, we appreciate your willingness to use the workaround in the meantime.

Thanks,
Korey

So I guess there are so many serious bug demanding their attention that they can’t fix this extremely annoying UI problem. Their algorithm for fixing bugs leads to low priority bugs never getting fixed so long as higher priority bugs exist. In technical terms this is called ‘starvation’. Oh, and Karey, I am not willing to use the workaround in the meantime — which is already 6 months.

Meanwhile, there doesn’t seem to be any great fanfare about coming features that would make me hold my breath and wait for some glorious future. I had a conversation with the founder of Squarespace a few months ago, Anthony Casalena, who waved his hands about a big coming release, but asked me not to post anything about it. Fine.

The other reason I plan to leave is that the streaming, social dimension that I love so much at Tumblr is completely absent at Squarespace. While the tools provided by Squarespace are solid and workable, they are nearly 100% oriented toward publishing, and zero geared to streaming socially. I am certain that the great majority of Squarespace users are happy with the technology and the company; perhaps it’s just me.

Ok.

Now I just have to figure out how to port my blog to Tumblr. That’s going to be an enormous headache, I know.

Any recommendations? Squarespace does allow me to export my context into a Movable Type-style export file. But Tumblr doesn’t support any blog import at all.

Maybe I am going to have to hire someone to manually cut and paste it all together.

And of course my links will all be broken.

Maybe it would be easier to create a new blog, and simply start over. More to follow.

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29 June 2010 5
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Notes

  1. stoweboyd posted this

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