I’ve been playing with WordPress for a friend. He wants to organize a bike race, and wanted to know if I knew anything about web design.
“Like a blog?” I ask.
“No,” he answers. “Something a little more robust than that. And I want to be able to collect entry fees. You know what? I was looking at something last night that’s almost exactly what I’d like, I’ll send you the link.”
Not sure what I was getting myself into, I opened the link with mild trepidation… to find a site built on WordPress. And not well built, either. OK, this I can do.
So I’ve been poking, and we’re still talking very shallow end of the pool here, but still a LOT more than I’ve done even for TDS here. WP is a remarkable platform. The extensibility available I themes and plugins will let you do damn near anything you want from a content management system, but still incredibly easy to use. I have to say, I’m just not missing Blogger at all.
Navel Gazing
blogger, wordpress
I’m a man of means by no means, which means all post-move housekeeping gets delegated by me, to me.
So it is that I’m working my way through my post history, rectifying the differences in methodology between Blogger and WordPress. What Blogger calls Labels, and treats as Tags, map to WordPress as Categories and are treated differently than tags, for there are actual tags in addition to categories. And in a bizarre way, and flatly in spite of the work ahead, it makes sense to me to do this.
I’m also trying to clean up paragraph structure. Blogger has a quirk – I’ve long been aware but have never understood the reason – it hates the HTML paragraph tag. Perhaps “hates” is too strong, but the Blogger editor just will NOT insert <p> into a post unless one goes into the HTML view and forces it by hand.
Nope, instead it tries its damnedest to use <div> tags everywhere, which would be fine if it worked consistently, but it doesn’t. What happens is, it works fine the first time, usually, and one gets double-spaced paragraphs that are pleasant to read. But dare you re-edit that post, and Blogger’s editor interprets the double-spacing as a need to double up on the DIV tags, which has the counter-intuitive result of single spacing paragraphs when re-posted.
Why, Lord, why?
sweep sweep sweep
Navel Gazing
blogger, migration, wordpress
Hey, folks! OK, so there’s been a slight change. I’ve tried to match themes somewhat* so it will (hopefully) feel familiar.
There are a couple of reasons for the shift. The first reason involves posting options – there’s a nice android app that talks well with WordPress (that I am using to write this). Since this is my own private install of WP, I have a lot more available in terms of control and customization. WP also plays better with mobile devices, even without the nifty posting app.
This adds to the second – I have the whole hosting account thing that I have basically been using only for the DNS service. Guilt + WP benefits = migration time.
I’m going to post “closed” on blogger with a link, but I otherwise intend to leave it in tact.
I hope everybody follows along!
update on themes – decided I didn’t like the attempt to match, and opted instead for something with a relatively simple design but better eye appeal.
Navel Gazing
blogger, migration, mobile, wordpress
For the past couple of days I’ve had a small increase in traffic – folks who show up, spend about 30 seconds, and bounce off somewhere else. The source shows as ‘blogger.com’. I’m not a featured blog (nor should I be…), so as best I can figure I must be in the current random cycle for the “Next Blog>>>” button.
And if it’s random you want, random I got. So, Howdy folks! Enjoy your st….. where’d you go?
Navel Gazing
blogger, traffic, webmaster tools
As my blog continues to pull down solid traffic numbers in the mid-single digits, and one day that spiked all the way to 12 visitors – in one day - I had an amusing thought…
I may very well be causing Google more traffic playing with analytics than I’m causing with the actual site monitoring.
Navel Gazing
blogger, google, webmaster tools
I’m thinking about moving this blog to a WordPress server. The software is available in my hosting plan as a 1-click install, and WordPress is mobile-friendly.
But, right now it’s just a thought.
Navel Gazing
blogger, migration, wordpress