One source of truth (or how not to be tied to a publisher platform)

Sadly, I don't trust Google LLC to keep neither blogspot nor blogger up and running.
More generally, I don't trust the 'cloud' to keep my data safe and shareable (have you read the terms of service?). That's why I recommend to all my clients ¹ to backup their work.
Backup is insufficient though, you need to restore (i.e. to make sure than you are able upload your saved data again).

But and butt, why on sky learn how to use, export and import from an arbitrary publishing platform? It might also be painful to move from one platform to another.

Instead:

• Choose a pastebin service with version control support, in order to:
  • Track changes.
  • Seamlessly have a local copy of your files.
  • Facilitate collaboration (whole books were written this way).
• Choose a standard text format you like or know (e.g. markdown, latex), so:
  • You don't have to do the formatting while writing (how tedious!).
  • You can easily convert to other formats (PDF, HTML, etc).
  • You can customize at will or not at all (for integration with existing theme).

As my postman said, those are words of wisdom. ²

Footnotes

1. I have none. That makes the sentence easy to be true. ↩

2. He was talking about something elsewhere entirely. ↩

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Meta: For gist.github to match your theme, you'll need to override css which is both tedious and brittle. I'm looking for a better solution.