For a while, I have been thinking about using my Stack Overflow answers (and answers on other sites on the Stack Exchange Network), and storing a copy of them here, on my blog as well. All posts on the Stack Exchange network are covered under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. When Stack Overflow was created, this license was chosen to ensure that Q&A data remained an open data repository. Posts can be freely reused, re-published, etc, so long as attribution is provided (who is the post BY, and where it was published), and derivative versions are also shared under the same license (ie, Share Alike).
As I started to run my migration, I forgot to disable New Post emails for subscribers. BIG OOPS. If you’ve received a couple dozen emails from me in the last couple days… Sorry. I’ve turned them off now, so (other than this one, for a real new post, you won’t get spammed anymore. I was going to wait to post about it until I was done–but since I spammed subscribers, I figured I should tell folks what I was up to.
So why am I copying my posts?
First and foremost, I’m doing it because I can. It’s a fun little tech/data project that I can work on in the evenings/weekends/lunch/whatever. I’m not doing anything crazy from a technology standpoint, but I’ll blog about it when I’m done to talk about how I did it.
Second, because I’m Type A and like being able to organize, control, and fiddle with my things. Sometimes I know I wrote about something, and am not sure where it was published. By pulling all the content here, I can search my site for my content and always find it.
Thirdly, having my posts here on am2.co means I get better control over how my collection of answers gets curated & displayed. I go out of my way to ensure that the educational tech content I create is freely available to others–no paywall, no registration wall, no ads. After Prosus bought Stack Overflow, and even more so after ChatGPT rocked the tech world, Stack Overflow has been….weird. Just weird. Prosus didn’t buy Stack Overflow for philanthropy–they bought the company to make money. The company has tried to increase revenue and maintain relevance in a world where developers and IT folks can ask Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, or Google Gemini for help, rather than searching Stack Overflow. To be completely frank, I don’t have a lot of confidence in the current company leadership to succeed–at least not in a way that fits my ideals. They’ve stopped publishing the Stack Overflow Data Dump (then started it again after outrage from the user community), and now have placed the Data Dump behind a registration wall. They are also expanding advertising on the site, and… well… I’m not sure how that will go for them. Rather and continue to wait and see, I figured it’s best to make sure I have a backup copy of my content, just in case.
So how are you migrating your content?
You aren’t doing it all manually, are you?
No, I am not doing it manually. That’s too much work. I’m going to focus on getting it all done first, then maybe I’ll come back and explain how I did it. No promises though–there’s a curse on my site that when I promise a follow-up that isn’t already written I get writer’s block when I try to do it, and it may never happen.
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