where I push the ‘go’ button and everything magically works the first time with very little swearing

After nearly seven years of faithful blogging at Blogger, I have now officially made the switch to WordPress. This has been a decision I’ve been mulling over for almost a year, but – like many things – I just sort of wished that it would magically happen without me actually having to commit to getting it done. There were many drivers in this decision, and one of the big ones was the complete and utter drag commenting was in Blogger. In the beginning days (when hardly anyone read the site) it was simple. But over the course of blogging there, I found that it was a real pain – and sometimes completely impossible, particularly from cell phones and iPads. The volume of emails that I receive has steadily grown, and many of you start your question or comment in an email with “I tried to post this comment on your blog but…” which made me feel bad and a little frustrated. Also, I hate Captcha, but I also hate weird spam about the mattresses and hair tonic you are trying to sell me, so it was sort of a necessity. I can hardly ever read those distorted letters and numbers, and who has time for that anyway?

There are other reasons I decided to make the switch too. After blogging for so many years and now over 2000 posts, the disorganization of things seemed really annoying. I would spend big chunks of stolen time trying to reorganize things, and for no real reason – mainly just because I wanted it to feel like a clean space.

I also started getting more frustrated with the limitations in Blogger. It feels like a bit of a step backwards to make the change over now, but in the end (after a lot more tweaking) I think I’ll have something that feels more like me. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone a little (a lot), and doing all* of this completely on my own makes me feel pretty good. I’ve watched and read tutorials, registered in at least five different support forums, chatted online and via email with people when I needed to. I have a new domain name that feels clean and crisp and all my own. www.thirdstoryies.com – no blogspot, no hyphens, just that goofy way I write it with the ‘y’ and the ‘ies’ to keep you on your toes. I’m trying to streamline things in my own little online world(s), and this felt like the next good step.

*almost all of it on my own – I got snagged up by a tiny piece of code late last night, and I surrendered early this morning to my hosting provider, and forked over a very small percentage of what I would have spent (had I handed the whole migration over to them in the beginning) so that they could correct one line in the whole mess and make it work. In something like 48 seconds.

So…it’s not perfect yet, but it’s here and I can get back to publishing. I migrated all of the old posts and comments from Blogger, and everything is set up to redirect automatically from links floating around out there. A lot of people end up here via Pinterest, so those clicks will take people to the post’s new spot. I’ve put in a request to Bloglovin’ to change the URL for the site, and I’ve still got a few more things to do to try to make this as seamless as possible because I like having you around. I don’t have any advertisers or depend on traffic to generate revenue so this wasn’t really a high risk move. I’m going to count on you all to figure it out. You seem like a smart bunch.

I’m by no means an expert on this, and I don’t even know if I’d point to one tutorial over another one. Every step along the way involved some little roadblock – no matter how carefully I followed the instructions. Every host is different, every plugin has its quirks, and I’ve had to learn a completely new language in the process. That was sort of the point, so I’m glad I stuck it out. There are some additional plugins and widgets to install and place, font and spacing adjustments on migrated posts, and lots of sorting and shifting of categories and pages – like getting the house stuff reorganized and easily accessible.  And despite the fact that it was written a hundred times over that migrating posts and comments a second time from Blogger would not duplicate them, they are all there, like the animals heading into the ark, twinsies. I sense a lot of delete button action in my near future. If you notice anything else wonky, feel free to point it out to me.

I like the clean mobile version I installed as well, but if you like the look of the full website (I usually do, even though it’s so tiny on the screen), then you can scroll down to the bottom and toggle over to full website mode. You should do it at least once if you only read this from your phone, just to see what the new place looks like. I originally wanted something very clean and black and white – to let the post images be the only color on the screen, but I changed those circle images over to color and I really like them so much better – it’s a colorful place around here.

Thanks again for reading along – some of you have been here since the beginning. I hope you like the new place.