Posts

Goodbye Google+ - Hello Blogger

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Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash Well Google meant it when they said they were shutting down Google+ effective today, April 2nd. Over the past week I have been exporting and migrating our community (read the past week's posts to learn more about it and this new blog). However, I was still surprised to click on the Google+ community this morning and simply see our logo and the categories remaining on the site  - Google is quickly emptying the tables, washing the dishes, throwing out the posts, sweeping the floors, and turning out the lights. If you signed into services with your Google+ account and "plused" things on various social media sites, those pluses are gone and your avatar is now a small gray head. If you owned or moderated any Google+ communities, I hope you took the time to export your data - posts, images, and videos. If not, they are gone with the wind. But do take a deep breath and relax. We are saying goodbye to Google+, which Google simply s

We are up and running!

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Spent the better part of the weekend getting our LVUG community migrated to Blogger. When you haven't done something in a while (my poor neglected personal blogs), there is a bit of a learning curve. But with the example set by Russ Worthington (thanks Russ!) and just a bit of playing around with themes, layouts, and gadgets - I think we are up and running. I decided to work from most current posts backward - so what you see right now is 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016. That is 158 posts published and only 924 posts to go! The remaining gems (924 posts) left to publish! Photo by Annie Spratt at Unsplash Here is a road map of sorts to help find you way here at the blog (so far ...) I have not added a subscription or follow by email gadget yet because I believe if you sign up, it will notify you of each new post (I still have 924 posts to add - I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy as I just went through spring cleaning my Gmail inbox). the search capability is at the t

A New Adventure Begins!

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Photo by Erik Dungan on Unsplash An update on the migration of our LVUG community posts, comments and recordings or images to Blogger. 1. I have exported the Google+ community - there are 1,080 posts and over 5,000 comments. 2. I used both the service provided by Google and another service (just to be on the safe side). 3. I set up a blog - lvugcommunity.blogger.com  (you are here!) and started importing the export (yes it is an interesting process!). 4. Blog post titles are slightly wonky or nonexistent and so I have been going through and doing a bit of cleanup. 5. Noticed that not all of the comments were coming through and checked it against some posts in the LVUG community, also asked the question of Google+ Exporter - of course they had a "newer & better" update (never do your homework early!). That did the trick - a few more posts but lots more comments in the latest export! So had to delete earlier import, and start again - glad I had not got

Migrating our Google+ community to Blogger

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Photo by James Sutton at Unsplash As most of you know, Google+ is shutting down effective April 2nd. Google+ was a great place for communities to share knowledge, ask questions, learn how to use software and technology, and just share interests - no matter the topic. A few of us got together and started the Legacy Virtual Users Group site in 2012 and then migrated over to a Google+ community in 2013. We have 1,200 members in our community. Now that Google+ is closing its doors, many of our members asked what would happen to our community - would we ride out into the sunset or migrate to another platform AND is another platform even necessary in 2019? I asked the question back in February so we could decide what to do. How do our members stay up-to-date with the Legacy software? Our members responded as follows: the vast majority of our members use our LVUG community, Legacy News, and the Legacy sponsored Facebook group; a smaller set of members use our LVUG community

Our LVUG community won't disappear - here's why.

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Photo by Szucs Laszlo on Unsplash For those of you concerned that this will all disappear - if everything goes according to plan - all the posts, comments and images in our LVUG community will be in the blog I'm setting up over the next two weekends. So no worries, those of you who don't use Facebook - you won't need to go there. The blog will be in Google Blogger (don't want to have to learn wordpress just to move this information) and the blog WILL be found at lvugcommunity.blogger.com (right now it is just a blank space but by April 15th (fingers crossed) the previous posts will be there and between Shannon Thomas we can curate. Wish me luck! And if you are seeing this in the blog - it worked! Right now, it is tick tock but we will beat the Google deadline to get this done.

Google+ communities closing down - what will happen?

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Only a week til April 2nd. Where are we going? What's happening? Photo by Ben White at Unsplash Read all about what we are doing - posting in the comment below.