A Blogger’s Progress

How far back will WordPress let me go? Can I go back to 1959? Yes. What about 1941? Also yes. But not really. The date that showed up on the blog entry was June 9, 2009. Oh well….

I’ve decided (I think) that I want to convert all my Web sites to blogs and retire the Web sites — or maybe just use their addresses to forward people to my blogs. I wonder how much work that might be? I guess the issue is that as long as my Web sites are Web sites, I’ll have to keep renewing the domain names and Web hosts. That means when I die they will eventually cease to exist. If I manage to get all the contents posted to my blogs, the contents will remain available as long at the blogosphere exists, which is forever enough for me. So now I’ve got to think through what I want to do and in what order. Plus I’ll have to work with my Web sweetheart to get my graphics transferred, and I’ll have to figure out how to link my book reviews to Amazon from my Naturalist’s Bookstore blog. Lots of work…. BUT the advantage is the end products would be permanent, infinitely tweakable by me, and all interconnected any way I want them to be.

I got tired of the black and white of the JOURNALIST theme, so I tried some of the blue ones. SAPPHIRE is handsome, but it offers only a five-line search, and I want a full-text search for this blog. CONTEMPT offers a full-text search, but it also has that confusing pop-up that says “If you are unable to find anything in these search results, you can try one of these links.” What links? So Next I tried K-2, which offers the full text search. Maybe I need to make a list of which themes offer full searches so I’ll be able to cut to the chase. I’m just remembering that good old KUBRICK has the most minimal search of them all. It offers just the date — no text at all — which actually makes it perfect for my Birdathon blog that serves as a searchable archive of all the species I’ve reported seeing on my Birdathon blog. Just to make my review of the blue themes complete, I revisited POOL and discovered that it has a full-text search, so maybe I’ll experiment with it for a while.

I just tried the new theme Vigilance to see if it had any potential for any of my blogs. It was too wide for my screen, which means it’s not an option. Oh well…. I like the Journalist theme enough to stick with it for a while.

I think I just installed Turbo and the Gears to go with it, but nothing seems to have changed. I wonder if I have to install it for each of my blogs separately? Now there’s an overwhelming prospect!

Today I started yet another new blog to go with a new version of my Web site, and decided to tweak this blog while I was at it. WordPress has changed so many things I’m having a little trouble figuring out how to navigate, but I did manage to add links to a few of my blogs.

This particular blog isn’t exactly active, but I chanced to revisit it today and have just been through a major frustration with WordPress. I was away from all my blogs for a month or so, and when I came back WordPress had changed the dashboard in ways that made it more complacated for me to post the kind of stuff I post on several of my blogs. It had also made yellow faces with different expressions on them a default setting, so all my 2008 posts that included a citation that ended /08 followed by a close parentheses had a yellow face emoticon. I was fit to be tied, but I managed to search the FAQs and find out what the problem was. Then I had to go to the settings of each of my date-based blogs and uncheck the box that WordPress had automatically checked when they did whatever conversions they did while I was away. What a waste of time!