Today’s the day, folks… this five-year anniversary of this blog’s inception. According to About.com, traditional gift ideas for a fifth anniversary include airline tickets or a cruise. I’m just saying.
When I started this blog on April 17, 2002, I was 22 years old, married, living in Athens, and about to finish my undergraduate degree. I was using a 350mhz Sawtooth G4 tower, which was a really nice computer and which I still miss sometimes. There was no such thing as podcasting. There were very few blogging tools available, and the ones that were available were pretty clunky, so a homegrown system was obviously the way to go. Plus it gave me an opportunity to practice (and improve, over the years) my PHP skills.
But now, five years later, in commemoration of this milestone, guess what I’m doing? I’m moving to WordPress. I never thought the day would come! And I bet you didn’t either, readers. I have to say, when I was messing with WordPress last week, getting the new site ready, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the WordPress back-end code looks a lot like my code. Only difference is WordPress has more of it consolidated into functions (which makes sense).
I’m switching to WordPress not because it’s the hip thing to do, but because I was happy to continue using my homegrown system until I began to feel limited by it. And, in the past few months, that’s what has happened. There are capabilities I’d like to have - for example, tagging - that I don’t have with my system. Sure, I could write that stuff into my system, but why reinvent the wheel? I don’t have time, and I’m past the point of trying to “prove” my PHP/MySQL programming capabilities to myself.
So, without further ado - the new site is (drumroll) beingamberrhea.com. Please update your links!
You can grab the new RSS feed at http://www.beingamberrhea.com/feed. Alternately, if you don’t want to get my daily del.icio.us and Twitter updates, you can subscribe to http://www.beingamberrhea.com/category/blog/feed for actual blog posts only.
The old site will remain for posterity and reference, but after a few days I will disable comments.
I look forward to seeing y’all around here!
READ ME: Disclaimer
8 Responses to "Moving in, getting settled"
I’m in ur new blogz … leavin’ my commentz.
With any luck, this shift to a third-party blogging engine will mean that you can devote any maintenance time once spent to providing even more content on your already successful blog.
Congratulations.
Nice! Congrats on the migration and the new domain.
FWIW, and YMMV, I think Google might heavily penalize vast stores of duplicate content at different domain names such as you will now have. They may have gotten smarter about it, but I remember reading back in my SEO days that it would really hurt your pagerank to leave an old blog full of duplicate content up at another domain.
Thanks for the tip, Garrett… I’m definitely leaving the old site intact, though. There’s not actually a whole lot of duplicate content, anyway, aside from some of what’s in the sidebar.
Happy anniversary, Amber!
Hey, and I may be visiting your neighborhood in about a month. You gonna be around for an anniversary handshake?
Take care,
figleaf
I’ve commented once, so maybe I’m still getting spam filtered (why oh why did I pick that domain name? Oh, right! I’d originally meant to do a 1st Amendment blog…)
Anyway, happy anniversary, Amber. It looks like it’s Atrios’s 5th too. (True, you’re not as famous nor as prolific but I have to confess I read you more often.)
Take care,
figleaf
Oh, fuck Atrios right in the ear. You and I must have different definitions of “prolific,” it would seem!
Thanks for the anniversary well-wishes, btw… and you should be permanently de-spammed now!
Blog To-Do…
Spurred on by Amber’s recent switch to WordPress, here is my very own housecleaning blog post
Optimize my CSS
Got the idea a while ago, since I need to update my theme/layout, I might as well make the code lighter.
Other ideas here.
Be more proa…
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