Bloggystyle -- The Latest

Renovation

Tomorrow is Change Day around here.

I'm taking the day off work and spending most of that time moving this blog from Blogger (booo!) to Wordpress (yay!).

The site design has not really changed, for better or for worse, in 10 whole years. In 2004, I added the Bloggystyle section using Blogger as my content management system. The site hasn't really evolved much since then and, unfortunately, neither has Blogger. I know they have new tools and plug-ins and whatnot, but they require you to house your site on Google's servers and, sorry, but no. I'm very happy with my Web host, have been for ages, and when I called today they even assured me that they'd help make sure things on the server/database side were good to go for the Wordpress install. I'm not sure Google would have answered my phone call.

I have no idea what Bloggystyle is going to look like after tomorrow, I just know that starting on May 1st I won't have the ability to post using FTP through Blogger anymore. It's forced my hand on a redesign I never really wanted, but now that I'm doing it, I'm going to go with a platform I really like and am comfortable using. Blogger, for a long time, has really not been doing it for me, but since this site has been so low-maintenance, I didn't really care.

Now that I have the chance to really burn it down and start over, I hope to do it right.

The plan is to install Wordpress, choose a theme that's fairly close to what's here now (or at least gives me the flexibility to keep the ads where they are and keep things neat), and move the Bloggystyle archives from Blogger to Wordpress. The pre-2004 journal entries should stay where they are as will the rest of the site until I figure out whether I want to convert the static pages as well.

I'll go back and tweak things later, probably try to tag/categorize entries in the archives. I will probably add comments to the site, which I've never used before and maybe some other Wordpress goodies. I'm excited and wary at the same time.

If things go badly and I'm not able to get a working version of the site up tomorrow, it may be a few days before there's another update around here. When things are working, I'll post a quick update.

Man, I feel like I'm going in for surgery. I feel like making the obligatory, "If I don't come out of this alive..." statement.

So, I'll see you on the other side! When next you see Bloggystyle, it should look very, very different.

posted by Omar G. at 12:36 AM

Continually updated...