SubscribeWhey hey! Here it is: an explanation for my ever so light blogging of late. I’ve had to say goodbye to Blogger and hello to Wordpress and it feels good to escape the disaster that is New Blogger* (aka Blogger Beta).
Many thanks to Ady Romantika for providing the escape route. Thanks to Ady you will not need to adjust your bookmarks; even individual pages have retained their original Blogger generated URLs and the RSS feed is still in the same place.
I did consider a few radically different templates, but there were a few legacy issues (the existing 956 posts were laid out to look right in the old template) and so I customised this one bringing it closer to original Blogger theme, while embarking on a major tidy up.
While the content remains the same, I’ve effectively taken the generation of that content in-house and the way that content is generated (a process that Blogger often struggled to cope with) could not be more different. It’s taken some hard work for someone like me, who has a very limited grasp of HTML and no grasp at all of PHP (but I’m learning as I go).
Given all that, I’m particularly proud to have switched over with zero downtime (planned or otherwise). The only small hiccup is that the old posts are dated seven hours earlier than they were published. Oh well. You go enjoy!
*I’m sure New Blogger is fine and dandy if your blog’s hosted by Blogger on Blogspot and you don’t mind regular outages (planned and unplanned). But if you’re publishing to your own server things couldn’t have gone worse. The other week I couldn’t do anything for days. There was nothing on the status blog which generally only reports planned outages (although I think it’s getting a touch better). It should offer some comfort that they know something’s broken and are trying to fix it. You’re left thinking it’s just you until you go on to the discussion group and discover many other people’s blogs are broken too. An email to support was answered nearly two weeks later with a message that I’d probably sorted the problem by now, but just in case I hadn’t I should check the discussion group and a link to instructions for adding a photo to my Blogger Profile. Aghhhh!
