Welcome Everyone!!
Glad you all could make it. I am excited and nervous at that same time, why Deb? why? Well my blog has been up for little over half a year and has been parked in its previous location on bloggers with everything intact and set in place. Switching to WordPress and creating my blog’s own domain was a bit more work, but worth it. I’ll give you the low down on my thought process below.
There are many things that I took into consideration before making my move. I worried about things like a widget or plugin working with new blog, getting the right layout (theme) the right colors and if the theme supported changing the colors, headers etc. After a lot of research and testing. (yes I installed WordPress locally and did a complete/full test design) I finally decided I found the right theme and most of the widgets/plugins could be found/used with my theme.
The next items on my “I won’t do it if I can’t get this to work list” was things like transferring my content, comments, followers. I didn’t want to lose any of it, but with some more research I found that WordPress had some great plugins that did a lot of the work for me. So I was able to transfer (most) of my content, comments. The only thing that wouldn’t transfer with plugin was “pages” I had to actually copy the content from my earlier blog to the new blog pages, which was easy to do (copy and paste) worked great!
Test site looks pretty good with the exception that I still need to get my followers working right (google friend connect) I saw a plugin in but I don’t want to start over, there has to be a way to import my followers. (one can only hope) So with everything working, looking pretty good I set off to find a host and register my domain. Scatteredmusings.com was registered already (sadly) the person hasn’t updated the site in a while (if I remember correctly) so I took Scatteredmusings.net oh well I am more of a dot net woman anyways!
Hosting was pretty easy I went with one of the hosts that WordPress suggested on one of their help areas. Done! I even had to get support from the host which was quick and friendly. Now I was ready to set up the “real” site. It was easier the second time I cheated I had my test site opened locally side by side with my new site I did step by step design.
I still have some final adjustments and I am sure as time goes on there will be things I am using that I will eventually find useless as there will be things I will need to add, but for the most part I believe I am up and running.
I’ve added a couple new site features you’ll find a bit of information about them below, please read the bits before clicking and going to the new feature. Clicking the links will open in a new tab/window. Thought it would make it easier for my readers to get a quick view of the new features and new layout of content.
Really? Seriously? Rant Page – a little area will I will share with you my “really? seriously? ” thoughts. This area may have posts that might be considered “censored” no I am not putting naughty stuff there. I am simply posting these in an area where you can choose to read or not. Most posts will be considered censored due to language or for a “censored type” picture. So before you visit the new area remember “please visit my at your own risk”
Blog Hop – I will be hosting a blog hop once a week for anyone that wants to join in on the hop. Just a fun way to link up to different bloggers and gives us a fresh new read and often you might find someone you really enjoy and become a regular reader. Read more about it on the Blog Hop Page.
Update 7/15/2011 – Networked Blogs isn’t working properly so for now I’ve removed it until I can get it working right. Please if you have followed me on Networked Blogs and not through GCF, I am asking you now to please follow me there. It seems that with Networked Blogs each time you move your blog you have to reinstall the widget which ends up showing no followers. If you know how to get it working and “keep” current followers please give me a shout
Thank you
let’s connect!