Up and Running

Well the new site is up and running — and no hitches to date. Thanks to everyone who has sent me comments and feedback.

The move to the new site has taken me a lot longer than anticipated and I’ve broken some cardinal sins along the way (redirecting my old blog to a holding page!) and I certainly need to make it up to my readers and get posting regularly again. In hindsight, I should have kept posting, but I decided to migrate my old content from blogspot, so that made the cut-over more involved and time dragged on. My site being ‘hacked’ before going live pushed things back a little too.

I must apologise to those of you who had left comments on my posts previously. The effort required for me to bring these across — let alone my technical competence — is just too great. I do appreciate your comments and interaction, so please keep commenting.

So, why go to all this bother? I’ve asked myself this question — and even managed to come up with an answer! I amaze even myself sometimes. The new site has a lot of added advantages for me (and readers), which include:

* my own domain name and email
* control over my own hosting environment
* better content and design control over the blog
* trackback capability
* ability to add features via plugins
* categories and tags
* readers can now subscribe by email (still a lot not using rss)

There’s not too much more that I want to add to the new blog at this stage. On top of my wish-list (todo) is a replacement photo for the mugshot that adorns the front page at the moment. I would also like to add some sort of banner image across the top … something to a bit of color and asthetics. Any ideas anyone? Other than that I want to focus back on content and posting regularly. Besides, I’ve got another couple of blog projects in the pipeline and doing my own site first was part of a learning curve necessary to get going on the other projects.

It’s been an interesting project implementing this web site. Implementing a WordPress site was for the most part a rewarding experience. WordPress has some great features including an easy to use management console and — once you get your head around it — a simple structure/taxonomy. I also found most of what I needed via the support forums and documentation. From a design perspective, there are many (_too_ many) themes to choose from. A hat tip to those guys and gals that have contributed! One of the things that took me some time was finding a theme that I was comfortable with, not only from a design or look and feel perspective but also one that had a nice, simplistic structure I could work with. I played around with quite a few before settling on one.

That’s it in summary … a new blog is born. Now, onto posting and new projects.

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