MondayLunchCrew

Thanks for coming over from the old blog.

I’ve been wanting to set up my own domain for a long time. There’s really no point in having my own domain if it doesn’t have content!
So, it was finally time to set it all up.

When I first got into blogging I wanted different blogs for different subjects and categories of posts. But that was hard to maintain and while most posts are really just about aspects of my life, it was challenging to maintain more than one blog at a time. But that was also partly due to my naiveté and the lack of features of the blogging platform. Aspects of my life doesn’t have to be put in separate blogs! One just needed a way to categorize them.

The more I looked and researched, it looked as if it was time to get off blogger. It didn’t have features I wanted and it wasn’t easiest to use. I was also disappointed (like many others) about the lack of innovations since the google acquisition (since been fixed. Let’s just say I’ve been thinking about this move for a LONG time!).

I looked seriously at the top two contenders for change. Movable Type and Wordpress. As you can see, I’ve chosen Wordpress for now. Here are the top reasons for my decision:

• Wordpress.com I had a go at the wordpress software by using their online offering. (like blogspot.com) It was easy to use and gave me a good idea of what the standalone product was like.
• Wordpress Development team: Humour.
• PHP: Moveable type is on perl, which while it would be easy for me to use since I know perl, doesn’t allow for me to learn anything new. PHP is a learning curve but it’s new skills which I’m always looking forward to acquiring.
• OpenSource.
• Import feature from other blog platforms. However, the new blogger doesn’t work yet. I had to jump through lots of loops to get the import to work. but if you haven’t upgraded to new blogger, it works like a charm! It’s only a matter of time before this is fixed.
• Akismet
• Trackbacks

If there was a way to try out MT before a major move, I might have gone that way too…

To be fair, the new blogger has many of the features I wanted from another platform and had they switched me to the new blogger sooner rather than at the latest, I might have changed my mind…

• Widget style drag and drop sidebar
• Categories. For mass edits of categories, Blogger interface is actually better designed.
• Hostnames. So you can have your own host name point to the blogspot.com blog. Very nice. Which I would have also went for if not for the fact that I have further plans for my own domain. This is a feature on wordpress.com as well, but you have to pay.

Just about since my last post, I have outside of work, been spending A LOT OF time migrating and setting up the site. Things are not perfect yet so there’ll be changes in the days to come. Hopefully nothing that will bring down the site. But you’ll see content and cosmetic changes for a while to come. I am planning on changing the theme more extensively but I’ll have to learn more about how to set up a wordpress theme first. For now, I just made some very cosmetic changes on top of the beautiful Cutline theme. It’s a lot of work and I’m going to have to go back to some other pursuits and come back to this.