Welcome to the Soft Launch of WordPress Selfhosted Tantalizing Tidbits!!

Welcome to the brand new WordPress version of Tantalizing Tidbits!! Blogger has served me well for the past five plus years, but I’m done with it. I’m taking my blog to the NEXT LEVEL! I’ve written a lot over the years, chronicled my life, what’s been going on, what I’m interested in, etc., and I was getting pretty nervous…all of this was owned by google…they could delete it whenever they liked, and I’d be left with NOTHING! Plus, it seems like most people are moving their blogs over to wordpress these days. I thought about it. A long time. Months. Longer? What if my blogs got lost in the transition? But I did it! I have a self hosted wordpress blog now! Well, sorta. I was going to get it all fixed up fancy bright shiny new for you and debut it, but it’s taking FOREVER so I decided to do a soft launch. I have no patience, afterall. So how did I do it? It was actually pretty easy…I followed the instructions on Mary’s blog here. I bought my hosting, I switched over the domain name, I backed up my old blog, uploaded it into wordpress. I switched the feed over. But that was the simple part. Then I’m stuck with a theme. Blogger themes are easy. WordPress themes are HARD. I have downloaded and messed around with sooo many over the past few days since I started this on Sunday. I don’t think I have the coding knowledge to properly do most of them. I was looking for more of a magazine feel…what you see is what I came up with – so far. I may yet find a better theme, because I don’t think I’m 100% satisfied with this one. But, it looks like it’ll do what I wanted, and even lets me program the boxes on the side (still a work in progress), and doesn’t freeze the theme’s name or logo all over it in ways I can’t get it off, so this is it for now!! I’d like to figure out a way to make and upload a banner for the title. That’s on my list of things to do, as well as add back the fun things on the edges, especially the blogroll. But you have cool new features too. Most noticeable is this magazine format. I’ve now got to add a featured photo for each one, to show up as a thumbnail next to the story, which you click to read the full thing. There is a popular part, so that older popular posts can shine, for people who missed them earlier, and a featured section, which I’ve been adding in blogs that I think are the most important over the years. That only shows a couple, so if you want to see all, click on the featured category. Yes, the categories, they’re like categories on a magazine! You can go through what you really want to read. And tags. I never had tags in blogger, so I’m gradually adding them. You can see them in a cloud at the bottom, which will be growing as I go through the over five yrs of posts, and tag them all. That will take a while… so watch the cloud grow! It might help you read posts you didn’t even know you wanted to read! I still have not really enabled my hosting abilities yet. I know it helps with searching and stuff like that… I haven’t looked at any of their tools. I have a lot of work to do, as I mentioned. But today’s soft launch will let me start also writing and posting on things I want/need to blog about, without letting things get TOO far behind. It also lets you see how this blog page transforms as it goes. We’ll see what happens…I’m excited!

PS If your bookmark, feed reader, blogroll, etc is pointing at the blogspot url, please switch it! It may not be, since i’ve had www.tantalizingtidbits.com from the very start!