Okay, you all, I finally did it. I managed to get WordPress installed on my own hosting account, under my own domain name, and here it is. All posts from this one on will be posted in WordPress.
There are still several things that are not “right” about this new scheme. I feel overwhelmed, for example, by all the possibilities. I cannot figure out what I’m supposed to do to upload and post pictures. I am not thrilled with the default template (theme) I’m using as of today, April 23. (In case you’re reading this deep in the future–woooooeeeeeuuuuu–I was using the WP default theme, with a little blueness in the header.)
But these things will come. I am truly amazed at the things I’ve been wanting to do all this time and just couldn’t. This is definitely software written for serious bloggers. I want to be one of those when I grow up…
IMPORTANT NOTE: For all posts prior to this one, “categories” listings point to tags at del.icio.us, using the very clever scheme suggested by Freshblog and Ted Ernst. (Sadly enough, the link to Ted Ernst’s blog on this seems to have died.)
[Actually, Ted has moved his own blog to WordPress, which is why I couldn't find the article. Here it is. Thanks to John, the Freshblog guy, for pointing this out in the comment below.]
From now on, however, the categories will be categories within my WordPress account.
After I’ve settled on a template, I’ll put the del.icio.us categories list back in my navigation bar for awhile. But I’ll start using WP categories right now.
Oh, one other thing: as I’m writing this post, I haven’t yet updated my Feedburner feed. So if you’ve subscribed to it through the feedburner feed, it’s not working yet. I think I’ll drop that link out of my nav bar, since WP supports RSS just fine.
[Edit later on: I have now changed my Feedburner account to point to the new WordPress RSS feed. My stats said I had something like eight subscribers through that feed, so what the hell, I might as well keep it current.]
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I think it looks great. I kept sneaking peeks this afternoon to see how your project was going. Since our trip got kind of rained out, I spent the afternoon on my own podcast-related projects.
And the like.
You’re not going to verify that respondents are actually human?
Hi Dave,
congratulations on the switch! Your new blog looks beautifully web 2.0. It’s sleek and white and I like it.
I know that me and Julie make up two of those eight subscribers, but more than that I can’t say.
One question, how did you import all your posts AND COMMENTS into Wordpress? Wow, I’m impressed! Could you please post some instructions here? Some of my Blogger friends have been considering switching, but haven’t because of fear of losing their comments etc.. I’ll definitely send them here if you do.
Oh and do you get stats for your standard Wordpress feed (ie. non-feedburner)?
Keep blogging, you’ve got yourself that niche audience. The one that’s interested in your midlife.
Hi Simran. Thanks for the nice remarks.
All I did to get everything imported was to go into WordPress and…click “Import.” I then selected Blogger and gave the login info for my Blogger account, and it all happened automatically. (Before I did that, I made a backup of all my Blogger files that were stored on my host, just to cover myself, and then I took them all off the root directory of my host, where I was going to install WP. I got this advice from a guy named Simran.)
After removing my Blogger files, I did the WP 5-minute installation on my root directory. As part of that process, I think, I was prompted to do the import. I truly did not have to do anything special at all. I was all scared and nervous, but for nothing, as it turns out. I installed WP 2.0.2.
After looking at your site, I decided to put Feedburner feeds on for both post contents and comments. I set up that second feed for comments last night. I just grabbed the URI for my comments from the WP comments RSS link at the bottom of my page, and put that into Feedburner. I know I should try to learn about WP stats, but I wanted to make it useable, too. And Feedburner seems to work fine.
Oh, and Julie, I found out that WP has a lot cooler and more sophisticated anti-spam tools than just that CAPTCHA thing that LibSyn and Blogger use. There’s a WP plug-in called Akismet that uses a lot of AI (apparently) to identify and hold spam.
Hey Dave,
thanks for the reply. I am planning on writing a post to help Blogger bloggers switch to Wordpress. I shall definitely quote and link to your article and comment.
I never really thought too much about “burning” my comments feed. I figured that since I have so few readers, there wasn’t really a point. But I guess it’s good to have everything up and proper from your own side. Even if the readers aren’t here yet, gotta keep everything ready for them when they show up.
Akismet is superb! It catches spam comments like a PRO! Before I got a Wordpress API key and installed the plug-in, I was getting hoards of spam comments emailed to me to moderate. Now all of that gets filtered out and only the “people” comments get mailed to me. The reason I was moderating was because of the mass-spamming from these stupid online Viagra sellers and online casino and poker sites. Ugh! I’m wondering if I should stop moderating comments now. It’s only been a couple of weeks since I installed it and it’s already caught 76 or so “spomments”. It hasn’t let a single one through. One thing I’ve noticed though, is that the spam comments on Blogger were much more passive and polite. On Wordpress they’re just sick.
Who’s this guy Simran anyway?
OOOH AI. that’s, like, my field.
Julie
Ted moved to Wordpress, and his post (which is v. useful) is now here.
Gee I don’t get much online casino and poker sites, but I do get Viagra and lots of opportunities to enlarge my . . . hmm, I don’t have one.
Julie
Thank you, John. I’ll fix the post to show that.
I went to that post on Ted’s site, and it looked to me as though there was nothing there. Just now, though, I scrolled down and discovered that it is there, just a bit lower on the page. I’m browsing in Firefox 1.5.0.1 under Mac OSX 10.4.6.
Congrats on a succesful move.
You upgraded! Last I knew you were on 10.3.9!
P.S. This blog is saving my information. I like that. In Blogspot I had to enter my information every time, if I wasn’t a blogspot person.
Yep, Julie, I upgraded last week, partially in order to make my new whiz-bang Sony Ericsson cell phone sync with my Mac. It does now. I can’t add new phone numbers to my Prius, but it works with my Mac.
Sir Fluffy, I’m glad I made this switch. I like WordPress way more than Blogger, and it’s great to be in control of everything about my blog. (I do, however, have a lot of learning to do.)
Dave,
about del.icio.us and Technorati tagging, it’s Technorati you should be tagging your blogposts with not del.icio.us. Del.icio.us will only organize your own posts in one del.icio.us (arrgh I hate typing that with those dots!) account. Technorati organizes ALL blogposts from everywhere. If you use Flock, the Technorati tagging on each post is built in. Have a look at one of my posts, I’ve been tagging with technorati for a week or two now.
Categories are great, but they’re not tags. Technorati tagging is something that’s bringing bloggers and blogs from all over together. If I were to go and do a tag-search on Technorati for “midlife” for example, I would find all your posts and all others from other people’s blogs, which have been tagged with “midlife”. You’re obviously already familiar with Technorati as you have links on both this and TWNs page. If you don’t want to use Flock, here’s a Wordpress plugin that I believe will do the job. There’s also an OS X dashboard widget. You know what, here’s a link to the Technorati tools page.
Julie, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I get “enlargement” emails everyday. Some are so disgusting. They go into unnecessary descriptive detail. Someone who actually want to find sites selling stuff like that, wouldn’t need to read these emails, he’d (no she here) just do a Google search. I can understand how something like this would have made sense in the hay-days of the net, but today with all these great search engines, why are they hounding us? Once I actually got a “shrinkage” email. It was hilarious! Mad spammers.
Back to Dave: congrats on the upgrade. I’m buying myself a Mac too. I’ve really had it with Windows. It crashes too often for my liking. I’ve lost some real good comments, articles, emails and codes, because IE, Firefox or Flock crashed.
I’m had the same problem with that guys blogpage. Had to scroll down a lot. I’m on Firefox, Windows XP Home.
Talking about you learning, I should be replying to your email now.
Simran,
You can set your tags so that they link to del.icio.us but can be read and cataloged by technorati…. You just need to make sure that the rel=”tag” attribute is present in the link. That’s what’s so great about tagging this way…
What is the new graphic on the page. It’s made of wood, but I can’t figure out what it is. . . .
Well, actually, if you click your refresh button it will be something else. I’ve got five images and a random-rotation script running.
If it’s an orangeish-looking bunch of wooden things, it’s the old interior doors we just changed out from the upstairs of our house, before being hauled away. If it looks like it’s got little maple-helicopters on it, it’s the steps of our deck. I can’t recall whether I’ve got any other wooden things in there right now, but it’s probably one of those.
Hi Dave! Yea for wordpress! It, unlike some other blog sites, doesn’t make you type in “the numbers you see above,” which makes it wonderful for me!
The link should take you to Starry’s Sky’s blog page! Hope you enjoy it!
Starry
Thanks for the comment, Ellen. I am in the very beginning stages of moving the Word Nerds blog site to WordPress. It probably will be a little while yet, because I have to figure out how to handle our RSS feed without there being a disruption for current advertisers. But I have bought the server space and intend to get it done in the next month or so.
This should make it easier for you to participate in Word Nerds discussions.
[...] What I’m really interested in is, what idiotic spammers are actually getting from spamming us. They try and sell me all kinds of pills and keep asking me to donate money to Nigeria! Sometimes they want to give you money. I obviously don’t want to do that. if I wanted pills, I will go looking for them (unlikely). Even if I wanted to “enlarge” things, I would not buy things that unsolicited commercial mailers send me!About donating to Nigeria, if I really wanted to, I would send money through trusted societies like The Red Cross, Greenpeace or Oxfam. A fellow blogger and friend Julie posted a funny comment on Dave’s blog. We were talking about all of this spam stuff. I’ve got an excellent spam filter active for the comments on this blog and it has caught every bit of spam to date. It’s called AKISMET and if you have a Wordpress blog, it’s waiting to be activated in your plugins menu. You’ll need a Wordpress API key to activate it. You can get yourself one at wordpress.com. [...]
*jumps up and down in excitement* yea! I can be a real Word Nerd! er, an honorary one, er…something!
Please excuse the innanity.
One thing that is fascinating is that I have begun getting Spam in German. This is really funny, particularly when I start working my way through it (normally they have a significant portion of words which are not in my current vocabulary).
About halfway through the second, or maybe third line, in my enthusiasm to read it, I’ll realize that this is Spam.