Bye Bye Blogger

May 27, 2006

In my ongoing quest to find additional reasons to sit at my computer, as well as my rather successful attempts at procrastinating what I REALLY should be doing on here – I’ve decided to switch how I publish my blog – and in the process do a complete redesign.

The redesign is actually a product of switching blogging software, but it’s welcomed as I was tired of the old look. Basically, if you’re not at all interested in the behind the scenes crap about blogging, this post is rather useless to you – but if you are a blogger or thinking about becoming a blogger (as in the activity, not a user of Google’s Blogger.com service), read on.

I’ve switched to WordPress, which I’m quickly discovering is just a helluva lot better than Blogger in versatility. As it’s all open source software there are a lot more plugins and neat little things you can add to it. Basically, where Blogger is a team of Googlites programming what they think is best for Blogger.com’s users – WordPress is a big community of people with an amazing ability to produce neat little things to make the blogging experience more enjoyable and useful (one small example can be found at the bottom of this page – it’s a little add-on that creates a timeline of all my blog posts).

WordPress is also completely independent. As I rent my own server space (ie. I have www.TheHumanaught.com and not thehumanaught.blogspot.com), I don’t need anyone to host my blog (like all those free services – Blogger, LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, etc.). Previously I had it set up so that Blogger would automatically post my new blog entries to my server and they would magically appear. It’s handy, and the software takes care of all the archiving and everything.

With WordPress, things aren’t much different in this regard, as everything is still handled by the software (I don’t have to really “think” much about archiving, feed, etc.), but I also have more control. Where Blogger only does ATOM feeds, I can now produce all sorts of RSS feeds which can help to increase my readership.

As I get a hang of how WordPress works, you’ll likely see tweaks and stuff here. Please give me feedback on what you think – just leave a comment and I’ll get it.

8 Responses

  2. love it……looks great! nice and clean look. i like this theme. very slick. i think chairman mao would approve. 😉

    how hard was the switch from blogger to wordpress? did ya lose any of yer content? links? i’ve been thinking about switching my blog over to wordpress or typepad, but I fear losing 4+ years of content. oh my…..that would be bad.

    i keep waiting for blogger to upgrade their software and features, but it just hasn’t happened. so, just wondering how your data migration from blogger to wordpress went…

    oh, yer not procrastinating, yer learning how to do cool stuff, which will come in handy in some future place and time!

    db

    Reply

  3. @db: Hey! Thanks for the kind words man. That was the idea, to clean things up a bit and make transitions to other parts of the site a little more seemless… a bit more ground to cover yet, but it’s getting there.

    As for the switch over, it was MUCH easier than I had expected. I likely wouldn’t have switched if WordPress didn’t have a handy “import” feature which can import from most major blogging software (blogger, livejournal, etc.). This will also make it easy for me to finally bring over all my old LiveJournal entries from when I was backpacking a couple years ago.

    WordPress is much more robust in features compared to Blogger… really just infinitely more so. The learning curve is a bit steeper, but all-in-all it’s not tough, and there’s loads of support.

    Reply

  4. My RSS feed here stopped working a couple of days ago — now I know why. I like the look, although, I’d say, I liked the look of the old one too (I’m pretty easy to please!)

    Lemme ask you something — who hosts your site? Can you run any kind of software on your host that you want, or is WordPress something that your hosting service provides? I’m assuming you use a shared hosting service, right? Also, what about the Google Ads — did you decide to eject them after the problems you described a while back?

    Reply

  5. P.S. You always seem to put yourself down as a terrible procrastinator, but let me just say, as an observer on the outside, you seem to me to be a helluva productive guy.

    Reply

  7. 🙂 yeah. Though if you’re looking for hosting, I’d actually recommend Site Ground now. IDSoft isn’t bad, but Site Ground gives you more for the money. Hey, if you’re going to sign up for either host, lemme know… if you do it through me I get a chip of my renewal fees or something (and it doesn’t cost you anything extra).

    As for the GoogleAds, whachutalkinbout willis? There’s GoogleAds in the sidebar. Sidebar disappears when you go to a specific post though. Might change this in the future. Not sure.

    As for procrastination – I certainly don’t mean that I don’t get things done, they’re just not the things I really “should” be doing. 🙂 I’ve a few things that should be taking priority over this site (Chinese studying, other site design, buying tickets home, planning school stuff), but I always end up putting it on hold when I get an idea in my head…

    Reply

  8. Pingback: Retiring The Humanaught | Ryan McLaughlin

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