Moving
No, we’re not upping sticks and heading to Corfu to become beach bums (though that doesn’t sound a bad idea), I’m merely moving my blog from its current home at Blogger to new digs at WordPress. I’ve done this before, twice in fact, so it feels a bit like re-marrying your ex-wife, divorcing her again, then marrying her for a third time, which is certainly a case of optimism triumphing over experience.
When and why I switched from Blogger to WordPress and back again isn’t important, and to tell the truth, I barely remember when, and the why was because they kept pissing me off. Seems I was a bit excitable in my younger years. I have more equanimity these days, and there are other mitigating factors that should make this move permanent.
Mainly, I have all my other blogs there. Somehow, I managed to acquire a boondoggle of blogs (boondoggle is the collective noun for blogs) and all of them are with WordPress, so this is akin to re-marrying your ex for the second time, and then having a couple of kids to hold you together. Also, I know what I’m getting into. WordPress is shit, but having created and maintained other blogs with it, I am getting used to how shitty it is and have since made peace with it. And lastly, Blogger—which had a wonderfully intuitive interface and lots of nifty widgets—decided the WordPress method was better, and turned their interface to shit.
Even so, that, in itself, did not tempt me to move. I was used to working with WordPress’s shitty interface, so the WordPress-imitation shitty interface Blogger inflicted on its users wasn’t much of a problem. It was the Feedburner. Feedburner is a Google-based widget that allows fans of a blog to enter their email address and, thereafter, receive new posts to their IN box, which is handy for sporadically updated blogs like mine. It’s been working, and collecting emails, for so long that I had forgotten all about it, until I received a notice from Google the other day telling me they were going to “improve my experience” by stopping the service. I hunted for a replacement, but there were none to be found. Oh, there were plenty of similar products that touted a variety of bells and whistles I didn’t want or need—for a fee—so the doorway to that option closed, especially when Blogger confirmed that they had no intention of replacing the Google FeedBurner with one of their own.
So, there was no point in keeping my blog at Blogger any longer, except for the 368 posts dating back to 2006. That’s a lot of history, and I was loath to leave it behind, but then I discovered you could export your blog and import it into WordPress.
Pardon me for being sceptical, but, yeah, right.
With that thought in mind, and not much hope, I initiated the process. To my utter amazement, it worked. All of my past posts, along with comments and photos, appeared in the new WordPress blog. There were a few formatting issues with the old posts, but I am more than willing to overlook that.
The final niggle was the URL — pcfatp.com — which was initially bought via Blogger, who was then taken over by Google, who then sub-contracted it out to GoDaddy, meaning I had to spend half a day tracking down the URL and getting it released to WordPress. Allegedly, this is done, and I’ve paid for it; I’m just waiting for it to take effect, which should have happened by the time you read this. This will allow anyone who accesses my blog via that URL to do nothing, and still find my blog. As for those of you receiving updates by email, I’m afraid you’ve got some admin ahead of you.
If you want to continue receiving post via email, please do this:
- Go to: https://postcardsfromacrossthepond.com/ — this will put you on the WordPress blog, if you are not already there.
- Go to this widget:
- Put your email address in the “Enter your email address” box.
- Click the SUBSCRIBE button.
That’s it. You will continue to receive posts via email.
If, on the other hand, you are someone who signed up long ago for reasons you don’t remember and now wish you had not, just do nothing. The posts will soon stop arriving in your IN Box.
The random example above shows the Archive widget. The one on the left is from the WordPress blog, which I pay a not insubstantial amount of dosh for and could not look less professional if I had cobbled it up myself. The elegant, easily navigated one on the right is from the FREE, unprofessional-looking Blogger blog.
That said, WordPress does have good customer service. Although, that’s probably because they need it.