The Change Explained

I mentioned the other day that I was going to be changing my blog. I was planning on building a new blog, getting it all situated and then making the switch. However, once I imported the posts from ToadMama’s Web Abode (old blog) to test the new blog, I pretty much had to go ahead and make the switch. I’m not going to bore you will all of the technical details, so you’ll just have to trust me on that.

Anyhoo, that’s why all of a sudden you find yourself here. I hope you like the new look.

The reason for the change wasn’t purely aesthetic. I’ll try hard not to get too technical as I explain this.

Blogger.com, which is where the old blog was hosted, is free. It’s powered by Google. As long as you don’t have an overwhelming amount of visitors (i.e., site traffic) and your file storage doesn’t exceed a certain size.

I did not have too much traffic, but slowly but surely I have been inching toward that maximum storage limit. I’ve been blogging for about two years now. And I post a lot of images. Image files are huge. I could have upgraded the storage capacity (for a fee) or I could have transferred the files to an external server. Since I already had my own Web site with a huge amount of extra server space, I could have just transferred the old blog. But I have never been overly thrilled with Blogger’s functionality.

Over the past year or so, I’d begun to notice that many of the blogs I visited had really cool designs. I wanted to emulate some of those looks, but Blogger just does not support some of the cooler stuff. That’s when I started noticing a lot of those way-cool blogs used WordPress.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Once I started looking into WordPress, I realized I could easily migrate my files to the toadmama.com server, easily get the more-customized look I wanted, and add functionality like separate pages. That way I can have the main blog page, which you are looking at now, as well as separate, specialty pages, such as the Photography page.

Why separate pages? Because not all readers want to read in-depth, technical discussions on photography. I also plan to add a Motorcycling page. And (surprise, surprise) a page just for the dogs, too. So that if I am doing an in-depth analysis of dog behavior, I won’t bore my readers that could care less about dogs.

WordPress is better in a lot of ways. It’s much easier to post images (I can do it in batches instead of one at a time) for sure. And you all know how I like to share images, right?

Like this one, which shows what our WV driveway looks like this morning. We had someone plow it so that we could get in here last night. It’s a good thing, too. See the size of those snowbanks along the side?

Here you can see one of the snowbanks the plowman left behind.

Back to the change… there are still some things I am trying to work out. Like my Followers listing. I’m trying hard to get it migrated so my followers won’t have to re-enroll, but it’s not looking promising so far.

I’ll be adding those extra pages I talked about, too. And probably tweaking the look. Who knows what else.

But it should work well enough that you don’t have any problems. If you do have problems, please let me know. Please. I hate when stuff doesn’t work the way I want it to work. You can write to me at toadmama_space_@_space_gmail.com. You’ll have to remove the “_space_” before and after the “@” to make that work.