If you read this via RSS, give me a click and come through to see what’s changed: yesterday, I migrated Professor Beej from its old Blogger.com hosting to an all-new, shiny self-hosted WordPress.org site, complete with premium Thesis theme. Despite everyone telling me for months how much of a difference WordPress makes, I didn’t listen.
I should have. The widgets and plugins are great (finally, no more editing HTML and CSS myself), and Thesis is just mindblowing. The amount of customization I get with it is ridiculous, even if I’m not using half of what it offers. Eventually I will make more use of it as I learn my way around the dashboard and get some web-design experience under my belt.
I still have a few things I need to work on getting set up right, but I think that’s limited to (finally) getting a banner for the blog and getting customized RSS, Twitter, and Email Update icons. I figure I’ll download Gimp (or Gimpshop) tonight and mess around with that a little. I doubt I have it in me to make something as high quality as I need, so if there are any graphic designers out there who want a quick project, give me a yell.
As for permalinks, so far they’re about half dead. I’m doing what I can to try and get them working again, but I don’t know if it will happen because unfortunately, I’m not too good at coding, and all the tutorials I’ve found seem to be invalid now. I might just have to suck it up that only part of my permalinks are still working and move toward a unified WordPress future.
My RSS feed should still be working thanks to Feedburner, so I shouldn’t lose any subscribers (and will hopefully gain a few!). If any of you have any problems getting posts via RSS, let me know. My Google Reader was hit with around 10 new-yet-old RSS posts after the migration. If that happened to you, I apologize for the repeated content.
I also took the opportunity to update my blogroll that I haven’t done in a few days past forever. If I’ve missed anyone who also has me listed on theirs, let me know, so I can share the love. And if you want to swap blog links, I can do that, too.
All in all, it’s been a fairly smooth transition. However, I’m still in the market for any and all feedback and critiques; I know I have a long way to go as far as customization and design go, so please keep those comments coming.
Graphic design? What did you have in mind? I’ve worked with Photoshop for almost two decades. 😉
*also knows some CSS and HTML*
.-= Tesh´s last blog ..In the Cold =-.
With regard to graphic design, at this point my main concern is getting a banner to replace the title at the head of the page. I’m miserable with Photoshop on top of being unable to really design anything aesthetically pleasing.
I’m basically wanting a graphic with the title, tagline, and to be graphically appropriate. Outside of that, I’m ignorant of what’s good. I *really* like the kind of logo that World of Matticus (http://www.worldofmatticus.com) has these days, with that kind of mixture of logo/banner.
Yay, welcome to WP! I’m happy cause finally commenting is really easy 🙂 Commenting on blogger is like getting your teeth pulled out 🙂
Love your RSS/Twitter/Mail icons 😀
.-= We Fly Spitfires´s last blog ..Theme Park Meets Sandbox. Themebox? =-.
And I have CommentLuv which I adore. To me, commenting should be easy (like you said, Blogger is NOT) and useful (so much easier to get clicks if they see the title of your work instead of just your name).
I’m loving WP so far.