Friday, January 05, 2007

Excuse the dust...

I stayed up to remodel this WonderDawg blog since I was committed for the time being to using the NEW Blogger since it came out of Beta status. I'm stubborn enough to work through some of the kinks while trying to ignore some of the online distain expressed by the new version of Blogger. The biggest issue expressed is not having the feeds picked up by aggregators such as Nashville Is Talking where this blog has a tendency to fall off the database.

I think some of my initial hiccups came with using the Mac OS, as I really don't have the benefit of "what you see is what you get" when I start adding and arranging element blocks, probably because the interface is not 100% optimized for the Apple OS.

After creating an element block from these choices...



...moving them into place didn't automatically snap to a grid... I just had to move the page element into the general vicinity, sign out and log back in to see the changes.

The other minor thing is losing all the links (ALWAYS back up template data!!!) that I had going such as the sub categories of Visiting 100 Blogs in 100 Days, Local Bloggers That I Have Personally Eaten Lunch with at The Mothership and other side bar items. But it worked out as I shortened the length of all the sidebar links by eliminating the ones whose blogs were dormant. I can catch a posting via Bloglines, so it's no big deal for now except hurting someone's techno link love feelings.

I copied and pasted the link data from my template backup into the dialog box...



.. which was easier than mucking around in HTML code as I know just enough to be dangerous with.

The other feature I couldn't add in was the "target="_blank">XYZ part of HTML code that would open up a new page, rather than redirecting away from the home page. Not a big deal, but I prefer to have multiple windows open.

I did look at other blogger platforms such as WordPress, TypePad and iMac and considered the concept of having a web page like www.myname.com, but the thought of setting all that stuff up, paying a yearly fee and more importantly, moving over all the content was not something I wanted to tackle. Especially at 2 am.

As for now, I think I got this NEW Blogger down. I get the daily dosage of my reading done using Bloglines where I have 374 feeds coming in and should I get behind, I just simply mark them READ.

Now If I can just concentrate on learning how to type...

7 comments:

Lynnster said...

You're a braver man than I, Mr. Woo.

Oh wait, I'm not a man. But you're brave anyway!! Good luck with it, sir - will be looking forward to seeing how it works out for you, Kerry. Looks good for now!

Anonymous said...

i took the new blogger opportunity to do as you considered, and moved to my own domain using wordpress. It's only $40/year for domain name AND hosting, and of course the wordpress backend is free. I LOOOOVE my new site. Of course, you have to be prepared for a little php monkeying if you want to customize.

Kerry Woo said...

Jeffrey and Lynster - Thanks for stopping by my blog - I'm impressed... were you both able to map all of the old entries over without too much mucking around?

Anonymous said...

yup, wordpress has an import feature that supports blogger. All i had to do was select from a drop down which blogging platform i used (blogger) and then click import. About a minute and a half later alllll my posts and their comments were at my new wordpress blog. I was pretty impressed.

Kerry Woo said...

Crud - too late - the train already pulled out of the station!

Wordpress says:
Howdy! This importer allows you to import posts and comments from your Old Blogger account into your WordPress blog.

Please note that this importer does not work with new Blogger (using your Google account).

Anonymous said...

ohhhh man, that sucks. sorry to hear that. i just read last night that the first main update in a while, wordpress 2.1 (currently on 2.06), is coming out soon. Perhaps the new version of blogger will be supported by the importer on the new WP version?

The WP support forums do have some workarounds for importing from the new version of blogger, but it looks kind of like a "try at your own risk" kind of thing.

People who switch to WP in lieu of the new blogger version are being called "blogger refugees" in WP world. That's pretty funny...and their seem to be alot of us.

Kerry Woo said...

I'm too faint of heart to try these workarounds even if I had a ten cups of coffee - appreciate the links however -