New home for Latter-day Commentary

I’ve been writing on Blogger for quite some time and have long wished for greater control of the blog.  I like the ease of use of Blogger but it does not offer customization features that I have read are available with WordPress.  All the old Blogger essays transferred to WordPress without any problems.  The links still point back to Blogger but that’s OK.

I’m not sure that I’ll be able to get all the same widgets in WordPress that I had in Blogger but I probably needed to get rid of some of them as it was beginning to look cluttered.  I wish there was a way to transfer my blogroll but it looks like that may be a manual process.  I also changed the theme to one that promotes the writing and not the design.  I like the simple header.  It speeds up mobile loading.

Update: three days later

The move is complete.  I may still add some widgets but overall, I like the look and functionality of the new site.  The biggest hurdle was transferring all my subscribers without having to ask them to subscribe to a new feed.  I simply had to break the old feed from Blogger and redirect it from here.  Easy, I know, but it took me hours to get it right.

Now I know why I waited until the three-day weekend to attempt this.  The learning curve for WordPress was not too steep, but there still were some gotchas.  The whole process was rather time-consuming but fun.  I’m ready now to do some serious SEO and to get back to writing new essays.  Oh, and respond to some of the recent comments.

No blogroll on LDC

I decided not to add a detailed blogroll but will maintain several in separate web pages.  The links are at the top left: A new LDS blog aggregators list, the top LDS group blogs, the top LDS solo blogs and a large list of LDS Message boards or forums.  These were all previously posted but have recently proven to be very popular reference pages.

Thanks to all the aggregators and fellow bloggers who have linked to the old site over the years.  I know some have already changed to the new site.  Thanks for your links.  A blog is fairly boring without readers and comments.  Your links bring me new readers every day.  I look forward to the continued dialog and hope my essays are worth reading.

7 thoughts on “New home for Latter-day Commentary”

  1. Looks good, Tim. I kind of liked the banner image at the old blog, but I’m guessing you’re not done with the template yet.

  2. What? No cupcakes or koolaid for the Open House? Don’t make me go back to Dave’s blog out of protest!

    Look’s good so far and I’ll be around to heckle you as well. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts with us.

  3. You apostate, you. Leaving blogspot….

    In all seriousness, I’d be curious to hear about your reasons for switching/pros and cons. I’m pretty clueless in this regard.

  4. Hi Clean Cut. Thanks for your continued visits. You have some great dialogs going on over there on your blog. Here are just a few reasons off the top of my head why I switched to WordPress:

    1) I now have the ability to edit comments and so do my visitors. I’ve long wished for that on Blogger. The comments are an important part of the dialog and it can be frustrating to not be able to correct typos that change meanings.

    2) Although spam comments weren’t too much of a problem on Blogger, they were annoying when they popped up. WordPress has a powerful spam blocker add-on that just works. I can review and delete them when I am ready.

    3) Always in the back of my mind was the concern that I did not have control over my Blogger account. I’ve read horror stories of blogs being wiped out with no backup. I have full control over the database in WordPress as I host it on my own account. I also back it up to my local WordPress installation on my own computer.

    4) So many times I wanted to makes changes to the code on Blogger and could not because it would break my theme and all my widgets. I feel like I was locked in and couldn’t expand it in ways that I wanted. WordPress is open source.

    5) I’m a tech guy so I like to tinker under the hood. I’m learning a lot about SEO and simply didn’t have any options there with Blogger. I like that Blogger posts show up immediately in Google searches but I want greater fine tuning.

    6) Maybe it was my theme on Blogger but I could never get trackbacks to work. I wanted to know who was linking to my posts. I can see that right away now.

    7) I started with Blogger because I wanted to see if I would be consistent in writing posts. The low start-up investment there was what I needed. I now want to integrate my blog with my website, which I’m developing in Dreamweaver. I want the look and feel of the blog and the website to match and to be on the same domain. I couldn’t do that with Blogger.

    Disadvantage: Blogger is free and easy. Unless you host your WordPress blog on the free WordPress.com, it costs for the hosting and the domain name. Having the domain name was important to me so I am willing to pay for the registration and hosting. It’s less than $100 per year – a lot less if you look for cheap sites.

    Neutral: Although I could have corrected this on Blogger, I had to remove my categories list because it took up so much room. I think I went overboard with widgets there. I want to keep my WordPress blog clean so that it can be read easily on a mobile device. I just love the new clean, readable look of this theme.

    Personal: I wanted to see if I could do it. Bragging rights, you know. I worked hard to make the transfer without losing the comments. I was very happy about that. If I had done a little more research I could have had it translate all the links to the new site but I don’t intend to kill the Blogger site so I’m OK with that.

    Bottom line: I like the new look and appreciate the increased control I now have over the blog. It’s my blog, not Blogger’s. I feel a bit more motivated to improve the content and dialog going forward. In short, I feel like Blogger was an experiment that worked, and now it’s time to launch something bigger and better that just seems more professional.

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