Making the move!

Back in March or April of this year, I decided to begin posting on my old Blogger blog more consistently as a way to record things happening at home, to get back into the habit of writing and to tool around with photos and content from a technical standpoint. Once I was posting more consistently and looking into blogging more seriously, I decided to switch from Blogger to WordPress, here’s why…

When I started the original blog in 2010, I truly wanted a journal. The problem was, by then, most of the kids were too old to share too much about their lives. Somehow, I stumbled across DIY blogs and I got lots of inspiration from them. Even though I’m severely design and decor-challenged, I began to post basic tutorials on things that I’ve tried, always with the byline that if I can do something, anyone can. I also love simple recipes, so I decided to post about our family’s favorites. Education, in general, and homeschooling, in particular, are always intriguing topics, so I occasionally write about learning or brain stuff. Finally, I LOVE BOOKS and write about books that I’ve loved or that we’ve enjoyed as a family. I write about random things here and there but those are the main topics.

The question is….why change? Blogger is very user-friendly especially for someone like me who doesn’t speak code. I was planning to have Hannah change my blog design a little and when you explore that to any extent, the debate about blog platform inevitably surfaces. Believe me, I had no intention of switching but more than a few articles made it clear that WordPress was a better choice for a few reasons. Design options being one, ownership of blog content and the popularity of WP among serious bloggers were others. I learned that Blogger owns your blog content and could delete it for any reason. You can read more about that here and here. Although that seemed unlikely, the thought of it was a little troubling. So I looked into switching to a self-hosted platform and asked for the minimal startup costs as a Mother’s Day gift. That way, if this interest peters out or life gets in the way of this hobby, it’s no different than getting a gift that ends up in a closet somewhere. (Though I can’t unload it on Craigslist-BOO!). It was fun to choose a domain name that matched my original blog title. It’s fun to own something on the internet-sort of. I chose a host service (Hostgator) that will allow me to register unlimited domains which allowed Hannah to make the move from Blogger (she’s way faster than I am). I’m also trying to encourage Mark to start an authority site about tennis and I can use the same host server for that.

I decided to make the switch to WordPress sooner than later because at this point, I don’t have a huge readership . If I ever do find my voice or a certain niche, it will be harder to move it later. I can experiment now without much disruption.

I went back and forth about whether to start completely fresh or import all the content from my old blog to this one. I settled on something in between. I did import all posts (including the cooking and simplicity blog posts from the old blogs. Then I went through and deleted some. Others, I reverted to draft mode. Still others, I need to go through and fix the links to or from. That’s a little tedious. I also made the old blogs private so that they aren’t publicly visible anymore but I still have a record of them. It’s nice to have a semi-fresh start.

I’m glad you’re here. Hopefully, you’ll get something useful.

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