Making the Switch

It’s still a work in progress, but I’m making some serious headway, slowly but surely. As you can see, my blog is undergoing some major, major, changes right now.

First of all, you may have noticed some downtime. This is due to me completely switching platforms for my blog. Previously, I was using Squarespace and, to be honest, they just royally pissed me off. Sure, it’s pretty, but the absence of such basic features as autosaving drafts, e-mail alerts for comments, etc. just became to too frustrating to ignore. In addition, the interface is deceivingly irritating. At first it seems nice and smooth, pretty to look at, easy to navigate–but then, once you’re trying to balance several programs and a blog entry, the interface makes you want to scream after it locks up your browser (and then loses your writing, since it sure as hell didn’t autosave it for you).

Now, as you can see, I’ve switched to WordPress and I’m incredibly happy with it so far. Not only am I saving money this way (I’m spending $3.50 per month for hosting, versus $12+ per month for Squarespace), but it’s simply a more powerful system. For a long time I held off moving up to WordPress because, to be honest, I was pretty intimidated. The idea of having to get a hosting server, and managing FTP and doing in-depth HTML and all those other confusing acronyms… it was almost too much for me. But I’ve summoned up the courage to give it a shot, and boy has it been worth it already.

It was much easier than I’d imagined it would be. In fact, it’s almost hard to believe it was as easy as it was. Despite some minor snafus switching my domain name (which ended up not really being snafus–really, I just needed to wait longer for everything to switch over on the back end), everything ran super-smoothly and I was up and running in less than an hour. Now I’ve already gone through several themes, installed well over 25 plugins, and I’m experimenting, playing, customizing and learning more as I go along.

I think I’ve pretty much settled on this theme, and I think it will actually have some drastic effects on the way I pull content into my blog, and my philosophy on how I’m going to be writing over the next months and years. But more on that later. For now, just enjoy the prettiness (or chaos, depending on what stage I am of customizing the theme and features) and play around with the new features as I add them. Once it’s finished (hopefully very, very soon) I’ll put together a quick post detailing all the features of the new Web site and how I plan to use this site from now on.