Apparently I have been posting new blog entries for a few weeks now and no one can see them. Oddly I see them and they say viewable by friends however they do not show up. There goes the fancy way of posting from WordPress to FB. I am back to the old school way.
Wordpress
Hosting Changes
All my thinking about changing domain names led me to another bigger change. For the past few years I have been using wordpress.com to post my blog. Before that I mainly hosted on TypePad for years. in between I played around with movable type, and WordPress. In 2009 my started using WordPress.com it was free, and they offered services cheaper then TypePad if I wanted any. At the time I wasn’t walking a lot and the easy dollars or so year just for bloging seemed like a lot from TypePad. With my recent revival to writing I was making changes to my site. Unfortunately any real changes that I wanted to make on wordpress.com would require several add-on purchases. At that point I looked at the price of a true hosting provider. I signed up for one, only to cancel the trial account within an hour. I then continue to waffle and signed up for another hosting provider. The second provider bluehost.com hey pretty decent rate for a 2 year package. It was pretty simple to set up all my content on the new provider and add both my new domain name and my old one to point to that site.
For the most of the life of my blog I’ve been on TypePad, but I have over the years used several different hosting providers on and off. In recent years using Google apps and other web services for free or small fees having my own hosted account didn’t seem like it was worth it. By simply decreasing my Google apps for business mail quota I was able to go from the paid plan to the free plan. That cost savings alone offsets the price of the new hosting plan per year, so I figured why not give it a try. I like the additional flexibility I can have with my own website. I am already playing around with media wiki again, and some WordPress plug-ins that I could not get on the hosted account.
Having my own FTP account should also come in handy. I can remember at least two or three instances in the past several months that I’ve needed it, most recently two weeks ago.
Now I just have to see if I continue writing to make these changes worth it. I told MC yesterday I would love to be able to carve out 30 minutes night to just sit and write. I always found that pretty therapeutic to do that. It helped me unwind from the day. I just haven’t done it in years. Of course it’s my luck that I decide to really get into this again right before I have a baby. That means pretty much no free time at all. On the flip side it would be nice to have time to document what the baby does, and other milestones. I think years from now that would be nice to have. I always said I like to write for me.
I will see how it goes over the next few weeks.
Back to Blogging
I’m back to blogging full swing this week. A lot of what I have posted for May June and July have been things I’ve just written and never got around to posting, or things I had rough notes about and just never really elaborated on them. Not fully sure what got me to start posting again, but what’s made it really easy has been the ability to dictate what I want to say to my phone. Currently I’m running Mac OS X Mountain lion. Unfortunately it is not currently compatible with Dragon dictate that I have. After a long day working and writing on the computer typing a blog post sometimes is physically uncomfortable. So before I stopped blogging I was using dictation on my Mac. I was getting mixed results from it, but I was using it. With me being unable to use the dictation software on the computer I gave talking into my phone a try. I’m pleasantly surprised by the positive results. I first tried my android tablet because it has off-line dictation, but honestly the keyboard editing on android has not been very fun to deal with. So now I’m using my iPhone 4S and the WordPress app to edit after I dictate has been pretty simple.
Web Updates
I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.8 today. Thankfully the update was fully automated. I know I am technical but something like this blog I like to just work. Not a fan of tinkering with it. I also realized that my URL is not indexed with Google. I figured out the problem and fixed it. I am finally becoming more comfortable with using WordPress after almost 6 months. I am slowly deactivating my Typepad sites. Not 100% sure I am going to get rid of them completely but for now I am focusing on my WordPress setup that you happen to be reading now.
Lazy Sunday
Today was a lazy Sunday. As with many Sunday’s I wake up with hopes to do something productive, but by the end of the day I haven’t been productive at all. I don’t really regret it, I just state that as fact. I did clean up my place a bit, and do the laundry but that is normal routine on lazy Sunday’s. Watched some TV, worked on the computer a bit, and then played around with the themes on this site. I settled on something less than what I wanted just because no free WordPress theme seemed to really say use me. Pondering buying a theme but I don’t keep one long enough to justify the expense. For now just playing around.
Changing Themes
Since I am never content with my blog theme, I changed it again today. I was never a huge fan of the one that I just had, but it was one of the better ones I had found. I am now using a theme that I like better. I am still not in love with it, but I will keep it while I keep looking! Can I ever be content, or will I always continue to tinker with this site? I probably will always tinker!
The old theme is captured above for posterity.
Live With WordPress
My site is now live with WordPress. They typepad version of the site still exists for now at http://powerz.typepad.com/. I am still tweaking some of the plugin’s for my WordPress install, but so far things are working ok. The hardest problem is getting my Feedburner RSS feeds to be the default feed for my blog when you click on the RSS icon.
I am still trying to find a better theme than the one I have, but for now it will do. More updates as I tweak the site.
The WordPress Plunge
I have talked about it a ton of times over several years but I am finally taking the leap and moving my blog to WordPress. I have been very happy with Typepad over the years but the flexibility of WordPress is bringing me over. I tried to build an instance of Moveable Type to port my blog into but I had issues with it on two different hosting providers. WordPress was easy to setup, almost too easy since I started and stopped working on a site at least a half a dozen times. I finally found and configured all of the widgets I wanted that I have with Typepad. I also found decent themes that make the site look good.
As I write this my hosting provider Lunar Pages is making some minor DNS changes so I they can host the DNS for my powerz.org domain yet I can continue to host my mail elsewhere. That will enable the URL I currently point to Typepad to point to my hosting account with all my other domain names. Actually since I am writing this entry on my WordPress site, by the time you read this I will already be running on the new site.
The good news for me is if I change my mind or end up not being happy with my choice to move to WordPress, I can always move back to Typepad. I paid for the service through the beginning of November. I know bad timing on my part, but I will wait till the Fall to cancel just in case I get cold feet.
One noticeable downside of my new setup is I see a bit of sluggishness with my site loading. I am not sure if it is the server my account is on, or if it is just wordpress being slow?
Playing With WordPress, Again
I decided to play around with my WordPress configuration again today. I am still a customer of Typepad, but since I already have a hosted web account on Lunarpages I have had an instance of WordPress sitting around for a few months. For the longest time I have toyed with using WordPress or hosting my own Moveable Type install vs Typead. I always keep going back to Typepad because it has most of the features I want and it is just simple to use and manage. Recently I have been contenplating cutting costs and things like two hosting accounts (Typepad & Lunarpages) seems like it might be excessive. So today I decided to search through the assortment of WordPress plugin’s and see if I could get my WordPress site to look as good or better than my Typepad site. So far I think it is dam close. Is it better than my Typepad site, I don’t know. Is it good enough to save $89 a year, maybe.
I loaded up the WordPress site with the latest backup of my blog. I will continue to tweak the site and see if it is worth it to point my URL to it. The big dilemma is that all the archive links will break when moving between Typepad and WordPress. That means all the google links won’t work. For that reason I am still pondering what I want to do.
Non Glamourous Blog Updates
Since I have given my two weeks notice my boss has not asked very much of me. I have completed most of what I can hand off to other people, and now I am in limbo until my two weeks are up. I am helpful when I can be, but since my last day is tomorrow I am pretty much out of the loop already. In my somewhat spare time I have tried to keep busy. I have put some time into some much needed cleanup of my blog and website. If you read this site and know me, you know that I haven’t said who publicly. If you do know me you see huge hints at who I am, but I haven’t ever been public about it. Over the past year however I have talked less about my work and more about general technology and stuff going on in my life. I have talked about general projects I work on, but nothing detailed that would get me into trouble. This is a departure from a few years ago when I was very detailed and vocal on the blog. Those expressive posts about work have mainly been moved to a private blog I have dedicated to work that is outside the public eye.
Over the past few days I have gone through and vetted out many of the remaining detailed posts from years past that talked more about work interactions vs what projects were going on. There are still tons of posts regarding work, especially early years at “Widget Tech” (still anonymous for now), but the more personal stuff has been moved private. I still will write about anything I want, but I will be maintaining the public/private blog for the foreseeable future.
You may be wondering why this matters? Well in the near future I would like to be less anonymous and more open about who I am on this site. I will see what rules my new employer has on blogging, if any to be sure that I observe them, but above that I want to be open about who I am. Most of the people I know that do blog are public about it, so I shouldn’t let one incident many years ago prevent me from constructively expressing myself online.
On that note, I had installed WordPress on my hosted account like I mentioned I would last night. I even imported all my posts from Typepad and tried to mimic all the widgets I have on my Typepad account. The end result looked pretty good, but not good enough in my and a few close friends opinions. That means I stick with Typepad. Hey, if you know me you know I blow more than the annual subscription fee in going out on a weekend!
One change that will happen when I make my identity more public will be I will move my domain that I use publicly to this blog. I will also try to en corporate the last remnants of my “traditional” website pages into this site also. I have drafts of some pages already, and one ore two are already posted. Allot of these changes are not really important but time consuming. I used my time this week working on them. I also switched the theme again. This one is more a darker blue, and less pastel. I am not sure if I like it better or not, but it will stick around for a little while.