I get a Pajamas Media link, and yesterday afternoon and evening my hosting service, which has been quite reliable in the past, goes down. I mean, way down. Even its main web site with server statuses was out.

Story of my life. But welcome back.

Going camping in the Smokey Mountains. The blog will be rather quiet until I get back.

I’m back from vacation, and I’ve approved some comments that were made last week. If you posted a comment and didn’t see it for a while, I wasn’t ignoring you. Really.

I’ll be going on vacation soon, so the blogging will be curtailed until my return. I will indeed be back.

Light (or, more likely, non-existent) blogging will ensue starting tomorrow for a week. The family and I are going to visit the nation’s capitol for Spring Break this year, so that’ll be a great time. Unfortunately, the hotels we’re staying at charge $10 for 24 hours of Internet access (on top of the huge price for the rooms and the charge for the privilege of parking in their garage…I get better amenities at the Hartsville, SC Comfort Inn). Thus I will be cut off from the net for the duration.

See you after Easter!

Well, we were never really gone, exactly. My web host had some glitch with my domain while I was on Christmas vacation and it appeared as though the domain didn’t exist. A few e-mails today and all’s back.

I intend to do more blogging in the new year. The MS has subsided mostly, though the right hand is going to be the last to come back. Typing is getting better, so I intend to consider blogging a sort of physical therapy. 🙂

This will be my last post to the Blogger version of Considerettes. All future postings will be made to the WordPress-based version.

What does this mean for you? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a little something. But first, a little background.

It’s been a fun 4 years and 4 months. I felt that, when I started, I’d arrived late to the party. In a very real sense, I had. Soon after I signed up with Blogger, they got their 1 millionth subscriber. When I first discovered Technorati a number of months later, it was monitoring more than 2 million blogs. As I said in my first blog post, I had a web page with longer articles, but I had done a couple of these articles in a manner very much like a blog (“Impeachment Notebook” and “Election 2000 Notebook”, this last one even has datelines in the latter half), so I was already set to enter the world of blogging. I even did a couple of “Fiskings” before that term was invented. It’s been loads of fun, and still is.

Since then, while I can’t find out how many subscribers Blogger now has, Technorati is now tracking 52.7 million blogs. So in a larger sense, I was an early adopter. Another thing has changed. In a UPI article on blogging from 2003, I was quoted as saying:

I wouldn’t mind having a little influence, but not to the point that I would feel like I would have to write something every day. I’m not that prolific.

Yeah, well I’ve gotten a bit more prolific over the years, eh? But I’ve hung in for quite a long time with an old, dated, blogging template that not even Blogger offers anymore.

Time for another change.

Enter WordPress. I’ve been looking at new blogging software casually, on and off, for over a year, but after my recent problem with my Blogger template, I finally got the fire lit under me. WordPress was one of the blog programs that my web hosting service would install automatically for me, so I took the plunge. I’ve given it a dry run, imported all my old Blogger posts, posted to both sites for a little while, and now I’m ready.

Good-bye, Blogger. I appreciate the start you’ve given me, and you’re still one of the best ways for folks to get into blogging.

Hello, WordPress. Looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

And now, what this may mean to you.

Bookmarks: First of all, if you have me bookmarked as “http://www.thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/index.html”, you’ll need to change this as that page will no longer physically exist Real Soon Now. Either you can change your bookmark to say “http://www.thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/index.php“, or just remove the page name entirely and use “http://www.thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/“. The latter option is the best way to do it, since if I return to blog software that uses index.html (or if I redirect it elsewhere), you’ll pick it up automatically.

Old permalinks: If you have links on your blog to any of my archives, those links will still work. Blogger permalinks always linked to the monthly archive page that the post appeared on, and I’m not getting rid of those pages, so nothing will be broken. However, if in the future you want to link to an old Blogger post, try to find it in the WordPress blog. I’ve imported all the Blogger posts, and you can search by date or by words. That’ll future-proof your links.

RSS Feed: The Atom feed for the Blogger version has been “http://www.thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/index.xml”. The new RSS2 feed for posts will be “http://thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/?feed=rss2“. If you want a feed of just the comments, use “http://thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/?feed=comments-rss2“. You can find links to both of these under the Meta section of the sidebar.

If you want a feed of a particular category, first, you need to hover you mouse over the link you’d click on under Categories on the sidebar. You’ll see the URL in your browser’s status bar (I’m sure most browsers do this these days.) Look for the “cat=X” portion, where X is some number. Then add the following feed into your feedreader, “http://thepaytons.org/essays/considerettes/?feed=rss2&cat=X”, replacing X with the number. One of the things I’ve been considering doing is a podcast, and if I do, the podcast feed will simply be this type of URL for a Podcast category.

Comments: You can! >grin< I’d love to hear from you. I’ve had a blog for over 4 years and never changed my Blogger template, and thus I didn’t have comments enabled when Blogger allowed for that. I hope to hear from y’all. For now, comments will simply require that you enter your name and e-mail address. Your first comment with the combination of name and password will automatically moderated, but, once approved by yours truly, future posts using the same name and e-mail will fly on in. Full registration will be available but not required, so long as the spam plug-in does its job. Hopefully we can keep it simple. If it turns out the spam is leaking in, I may turn on mandatory registration. Hope I don’t have to, but fair warning.

I’m using a plug-in that allows you to subscribe to comments, meaning you can put your e-mail address in to get notified when someone comments on a particular post. This can be any post, not just ones you leave a comment in, but for those you do comment in, it’ll let you know when someone’s added their 2 cents or replied to you. Could come in handy.

Speaking of comments, you should speak nicely. I have an official Comment Policy (see the Pages section on the sidebar). Please read it before posting your own consideration.

Contact Form: I now have a page where you can send me a private note/question/atta-boy/rant. It, too, can be found in the Pages section of the sidebar.

Thanks for stopping by Considerettes. I hope you like the new layout, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Doug Payton

Technorati Tags: WordPress, Blogger, blogging, Technorati

Now that I have all my Blogger posts imported into WordPress, I’m doing what we call in the computer biz a parallel test.  I’m posting the same thing in both environments to keep the WP blog up-to-date as well as learn any of its quirks and make sure the tool I typically use for blogging (w.bloggar, who’s website seems to be MIA) will still work with WP and how it’ll works with it.  I’m adding categories to each new post, so the category list will be populated with a few things when I go live (but I’m not going back through the previous 1,829 posts to do that; they’ll just have to stay Uncategorized).

Lots of fun!