I don’t know exactly when it was added, but WordPress.com finally has a way to export your media uploads! When I moved off of WordPress.com, a couple of years ago, the only way to “get” your media was to export your posts, and your new site would download the files as the posts that used them were imported. This was obviously very error-prone, wouldn’t work for media not used in posts, and spectacularly failed to work for me — leaving a great deal of my uploaded media stranded on the WordPress servers. With this new export option I’ve just downloaded 1.5GB of media from two sites I had hosted on the service, so I might finally be able to reconstruct several old posts. Happy days!
I signed up to Proton Mail today, as the first step in a push to de-Googlefy* myself, amongst other “silo quits” I’m hoping to do this year. Email is a very minor part of my online life, but it’s part of the foundations, so it makes sense to move this first.
So begins the long process of switching over various accounts to use the new address. I’m not planning on switching everything – for example, I’ll not use it for anything social media related. A couple of important accounts have already switched, and apart from a few… oddities… as apps updated their cached details, these switches have gone smoothly enough.
* It won’t be a complete removal, unfortunately… for a bunch of disperate but important reasons I’ll need to keep the account open for the time being. Hopefully next year I can cut free entirely.