Blogging about blogging is something I find quite tediously dull. Some of it is interesting: the social effects of blogging, by which I mean switching off your computer and meeting people in the pub: that’s quite good. But those posts about today I decided to redesign my site by moving the menu bar four pixels to the left and altering the background by one shade of blue, which may perhaps be of use to some geeky bloke with too much time on his hands (e.g. Pete) somewhere, are definitely the ones I skip when they show up on Kinja.
So today I am going to point out to you that this week I have migrated Rise from MT to WordPress. I don’t know if I like the WP interface better or not, but if it saves me a bit of spam it will make me happy. When I say “I” migrated, obviously I mean Pete did it.
I then spent yesterday afternoon importing posts from all my older blogs, starting right back in June 2001 on The Umbrella Stand, and selecting only those particularly juicy or writerly or milestoneish ones, and categorised them under reposts. This process was in some parts quite traumatic, and you should be happy to know that a lot of the nasty stuff has not been included; I re-read it so that you don’t have to.
Some noteworthy points:
- I have been blogging for nearly five years. Longer than Pete, the same length of time as Anna.
- I used to post two or three times a day, and over 90% of it was garbage. The whole exercise has made me wary of ranting posts, which generally turn out to be incoherent; and keen to avoid content-free rubbish like memes.
- I have blogged in so many different places that it was quite hard to find it all. Some posts had to be pasted in from blogger, some from the old Uborka archive pages, some could actually be imported from the three different MT blogs. Now it is all together under one roof, and there will be no more of this spreading myself out or jumping from blog to blog. Rise is where it’s staying.
I keep looking at the WordPress documentation – and each time, without fail, it makes my eyes bleed and my heart palpitate.
woo! wordpress!
Vaughan, you don’t blog anyway. What possible use could you have for WordPress? It will only make you feel pressured to blog!
Oooooooooh!
Look at the pretty thing with the signature!
That’s a good idea.
want it.
Yeah, right…!
BTW, completely off topic, last week I was out with a friend who speaks about six languages and has knowledge of about thirty others. We got chatting to a man and asked him where he was from (he had a slight foreign accent). He said he was from Hungary, so Friend spoke to him what I can only assume was Hungarian. At that precise moment the accumulated alcohol I had consumed earlier in the evening hit my brain and I declared I knew some Hungarian. I started saying Uborka! and the guy was amused – and bemused – why someone should know just the word for cucumber. And my language friend didn’t know it!
Yes, it’s part of my plan to feel pressured to blog again. I’ve actually hired a small group of children to run up to my front door and rattle the letterbox and shout “BLOG!” through it at regular intervals.
Mind you, then again, I’m so taken with the cool signature idea that I think that alone might encourage me to return to the web. I am so so envious. Forget RSS feeds and podcasts and, oh, other things, that is seriously the best thing I’ve ever seen anywhere. Me want too.
Ahem. I had the signature thing first.
Yes but you are so secretive about your URL, that no-one has actually seen it. So mine wins.
Love the new sig thing. Rocks.
Just had to say, and you probably expect this of me, but is it the length or your blog that counts or the quality?
Well I’ve reposted about 30 out of 5 years’ worth of entries, so which do you think it is?
The length of time remark is just for comparative purposes. Didn’t realise I was getting so long in the tooth.
five and a half years cof
WordPress still refuses to display my archives and I can’t figure out why – but spam comments are a thing of the past, so that’s good.
I’m going to Hungary later this year, and my only word is Uborka. I fear I may offend a very large number of Hungarians.
Graybo: I’m on the case. Sorting out your archives is my new project.
I’ve sent you an email.