I’d been thinking about moving away from Ycool for several years. Ever since the emails I sent to Ycool’s customer-service mailbox reporting bugs and making suggestions all sank without a trace, I began to keep an eye on other blog service providers. But I never found a suitable place. Domestic blog hosts were either too weak in features or too strict in censorship, while the foreign blogs that should have been reachable were all behind the Great Firewall.
Of course, more crucially, I care about historical continuity and unity, and I’m unwilling to sever all my old posts and start over from scratch. Yet moving all the old posts over as a whole is itself a huge undertaking. If I didn’t find somewhere especially suitable, I wouldn’t make up my mind to move.
Recently Ycool moved its servers to the United States, making access from domestic education-network connections difficult to the point of near impossibility (it is said that on campus, using Sogou Browser’s high-speed mode still allows access). This prompted me once again to search for a suitable blog service provider. But the purpose of the search was no longer to solve the education-network access problem, because I also don’t expect to find a suitable platform on domestic servers; besides, if the servers are located in China, that in itself feels rather unsettling. What I was trying to find was a platform that makes import and export convenient, so that once this relocation is completed, moving elsewhere or setting up a mirror in the future will be easy.
At first Ycool also provided XML export service, allowing one to back up the blog at any time. Although it could only back up posts and not comments, it was at least reassuring. But very soon that service was discontinued. At the beginning, there was always a note on the site saying that, because of server capacity limitations, backups could not be provided, but that they would certainly be available in the future. Yet somehow all of those things disappeared as well. Back then Ycool also promised that if the site had to shut down for some reason, everyone would be given half a year to back up their data and so on. Now those promises are nowhere to be seen—though I can still dig them out from the earliest posts on Ycool’s official blog (ycul.ycool.com). But the link to Ycool’s official blog long ago vanished from the Ycool homepage, and it has not been updated for many years either. The lively, personality-filled little Ycool on ycul is gone. Although Ycool’s service is still being updated, and they even recently changed the post editor (making it worse), it is as if a living person had turned into a machine, with no personality left at all.
When I choose an online service, besides looking at whether the technology it provides is easy to use, I also care about the site’s own character, positioning, and ideals. Of course there are times when one has no choice, as with QQ, RenRen, and the like—that is a makeshift solution under conditions of insufficient choice. Once there is room to choose, as with email or blogs, I must choose a site I identify with. A site like Sina, even if it also provides a WordPress platform, would not be one I would choose just because of the personality conveyed in its terms of service. Websites all have personalities and tastes; this can be seen in what kind of services they devote themselves to providing, and it is also embodied in the lines and between-the-lines of their communication with users.
Back in the day, Ycool had a slogan: “Recording our era.” Just this sentence was enough for me to identify with Ycool’s personality. It is an ordinary, plain slogan, but upon closer look it also radiates a spirit of grand ambition. This is the most fitting self-positioning for a blog platform, and also a sense of mission belonging to an era. This sentence is still hanging in the upper-left corner of Ycool’s backend page to this day: 
But I suspect this is only because Ycool has been negligent about updating, since Ycool’s domain name had long since changed from the original YculBlog to Ycool. So can the current Ycool still utter such a simple and straightforward slogan? I very much doubt it.
When I was searching for a new blog platform—especially a WordPress-based one (which best meets the requirement of easy import and export)—I saw another slogan: “Words and images outlive us.” This too is a plain and simple statement, but it is forceful; it directly states what a blog platform ought to care about. Through this sentence, the “Aixiezi” blog declared its own positioning:
“Aixiezi only provides BSP services for WordPress, and will not do what many BSPs try to do in turning BSPs into centralized, portal-like, networked, and socialized entities. Our idea is that we simply want to focus on giving you a quiet, powerful, and stable writing platform. We believe in your inspiration and creativity.
We believe that ceaselessly hyping up certain spotlighted pieces of text without need, blindly socializing the creative platform, and pushing the truly core things in blog creation—texts, images, sounds, and the like—to the margins, while instead waving around some peripheral concepts on stage and hopping about, may perhaps already have given birth to a commercially successful model, but it is destined never to give birth to the kind of culture and atmosphere that present-day China most lacks: quiet, down-to-earth, and imbued with texture and substance.
Although Aixiezi’s strength is slight, we will strive to provide a good platform for those who move forward in a down-to-earth manner. We are willing to keep working continuously for the sake of your user experience.”
Clearly, such positioning moved me. Just like the old Ycool, “Aixiezi” focuses on blogging, focuses on “recording,” appears low-key yet harbors great ambition. I, of course, am willing to take up residence on such a blog platform.
I wrote to Aixiezi’s contact person, offered some suggestions, and asked about a few things, and very quickly received a friendly, patient, and energetic reply. Even more perfectly, the blog service they provide is exactly the WordPress platform, and I happened to register the account “philo” there (since most ordinary registration systems now require more than four characters, an account like EPR is hard to get, but isn’t philo an even more perfect account?). There was no reason not to start moving—so my new blog address is http://philo.ixiezi.com.
By the way, I also registered at an even more marvelous place: http://philo.blog.com. That such a service provider with a perfect domain name would also let me register an account like philo, and still not be behind the Great Firewall, is truly unexpected. Blog.com is also on the WordPress platform, so I can migrate relatively easily between Aixiezi and Blog.com. But after all, considering my identification with Aixiezi’s character, and considering the friendliness of a Chinese-language platform as well as the flexibility of themes and plugins, Aixiezi is unquestionably still the first choice. Therefore my main blog will be http://philo.ixiezi.com, while Blog.com can become a regularly backed-up mirror.
As for the Ycool blog, this will be the last post here. All earlier posts will remain preserved and open, but comments will be closed across the board. If you want to comment or read posts after today, please move over to http://philo.ixiezi.com!
As for the situation where the education network cannot see the blog, first please try Sogou Browser’s high-speed mode; second, you can find a proxy; finally, you can follow me on RenRen, where I have set things up so that posts from ixiezi are imported into RenRen every day.
The WordPress platform has many advantages, among which the greatest and most crucial is its category system. On Ycool, the category system is still a “folder”-style one, the form of segmented entries from the print era. WordPress’s category system is truly HTML-like, and belongs to the network age. When I migrated Ycool’s posts into Aixiezi, I did not alter the content of the posts, but I did change the category and tag settings. I still have not fully designed the new category system. As for exactly what advantages it has, I will write another post in the coming days to explain it. The new posts will be published at http://philo.ixiezi.com.
December 10, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply