I’m plodding away, trying to get the new blog sorted out. On the one hand, I’m fairly pleased that the bulk of the old blogs have been copied over successfully, including
1) Reader comments
2) Getting the photos moved off Blogger on to my own host
On the other, there’s still a lot to do :-
1) I’ve just noticed all of the comments are attributed to ‘Anonymous’.
2) Almost all of the technical posts are corrupted in some way because the software can’t cope with various things in the code examples
3) My beloved template chooser isn’t quite as successful as I hoped because some templates don’t work very well with the current content.
4) I’ve decided I might as well bring the Tripod blogs across, too.
I am absolutely determined that I will *not* spend too much time on this. I have a paying job, family and lots of Oracle stuff I’d rather be doing but hopefully I can get things to a reasonably tidy state.
To be honest, I have simple wishes for the next 10 hours. Tonight is the last night of my on-call week and it’s fingers crossed that no-one phones me. It’s been a long and occasionally interesting week with a couple of problems that might be worth blogging about later.
Well, now I’ve finally worked out what’s happening, I thought I should post that -like everyone else that has posted here- the changes are for the better. I agree with Niall, too: a lot of your templates are very good, so you’ve clearly found a tweakable platform, which is good for the future -though I am not so sure it was a wise choice if you have plans to go Joomla in the future. (Though I might have imagined that bit): WordPress wraps nicely in Joomla. But Serendipity? Well, let’s just say it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
I’d be interested to hear why WordPress was ruled out, actually.
Anyway: never mind the old stuff. That you have carried across the old posts AND comments is in itself a triumph, and anything after that is just gloss and glitter. Rogers’ First Law of Blogging is that if you ever switch providers, all bets are off and data will be lost. What’s more, most Blog content is ephemeral at the best of times, so Rogers’ Second Law of Blogging is that Law One doesn’t usually matter that much.
Don’t worry about the templates, either. Users are generally smart enough to pick from the smorgasbord of templates on offer those which are actually attractive and functional. You can always delete a handful of horrors when you have an idle half hour or so.
“WordPress wraps nicely in Joomla. But Serendipity? Well, let’s just say it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
I’d be interested to hear why WordPress was ruled out, actually.”
Stupidity?
There was really no logic behind it at all – a mate liked it 😉 I had planned to make the whole process more considered and that I would play around with a few options, but Blogger forced my hand.
I’m sure I won’t stick with this particular blogging platform forever (my first task will be to change the stupid URL to something platform-neutral!) but it gives me time to consider the options and now that I have a host, PHP and MySQL, I hope any transition might be slightly painful but more seamless to the outside world.
“most Blog content is ephemeral at the best of times”
Agreed. I reckon most regular readers won’t give a toss about old blogs, but Google does have a habit of delivering readers to them.
Thanks for the other comments, too. It all looks a bit messy to me at the moment, actually, but I can imagine things will be much better in the end …