Alternate Title: New Blog. Who Dis?

As you probably have noticed things have changed around here during the holidays. In 2013, after years of paying for a wordpress site I hardly ever blogged on, I moved my blog to the free blogger platform. I’ve moved back to wordpress and having the site hosted by a paid provider. I am not really sure why I did it. I have been telling myself it’s part of my de-googling my life. Blogger is owned by Google.

I tested everything on my computer before trying to make the transition. I installed WordPress 5 and followed these instruction to transfer over my stuff from blogger. Everything worked great. I didn’t redirect the old blog to the new one. You can still get to it at wonky73.blogspot.com. All the old links should work and just point to the new version of that post.

I did encounter some problems once I tried to move things to the live server. The first problem I encountered was getting the domain to point to the new server. I then had trouble getting the ssl cert I had gotten from Let’s Encrypt to work.

The most annoying thing that happened, is that the embedded videos didn’t come over. On my test version, everything copied over fine. But for some reason on the live version no embedded videos. I tried deleting everything and using different options for importing the old blog but they didn’t change anything. Looks like I will have to go back and re-embed all the videos. This isn’t the worst thing since I was planning on bringing back some old Music Mondays and adding an explanation as to why I chose that song. I also should catalog them so I can tell if I am doing a repeat.

When I switched from WordPress to blogger back in 2013 one of the things I missed was the WP themes. WP had so many great blogging themes. I can’t remember the name, but I used a theme that was free and almost completely customizable. Blogger had a bunch of themes from the mid-aughts that hadn’t been updated in years. I come back and yes there are a million themes for WP but most of them suck and aren’t for blogs. They are for basic business websites. They mimic the bootstrap look of having a big image and then three blocks beneath. Also, there are a bunch of one-off themes like Bob’s Wedding. I tried to use the filter option in the theme search but it’s still full of bootstrap clones. Maybe I’ll just make my own theme.

Finally, we gotta talk about this editor. I had an option when I installed to “Use old editor”. I foolishly chose the new editor. New is better, right? I don’t know where to begin. Maybe I’ll get used to it and there is reason why they think this is better. I usually write posts in another app and just copy and past them into the blog. I haven’t tried this yet.

Welcome to the new blog. Same as the old blog. Back to normal posting.