Test. Feel free to ignore.

One of the reasons I wanted to move my blogs to a self-hosted site was to have more flexibility in designing the look of the site and to learn a few things along the way. I tweaked the look of an existing template and more or less left it alone for a while. I recently began playing around with the look a bit more. A lot of those changes haven’t gone live yet, but a few have, like creating some white space around all the items in the sidebars. And I’ve been playing around with what I want in the sidebars on Being and Formulating.

My point being is that as I test different options, the look of the sites may look a bit funky (not necessarily in a good way) from time to time. If you are just reading the feed, then, of course, none of this matters.

When I moved Tombrarian to this self-hosted site, I decided to use Feedburner in the hopes of getting better statistics and of using some of their options to help publicize the site and gain new readers. However, it seems as if the Feedburner code has really been slowing the site down, so I decided to scrap Feedburner and just go with the WordPress feed. Many apologies if you need to yet again re-subscribe, which you can do via the link on the upper right sidebar.

I may also need to stop posting youtube videos as they seem to be creating a significant lag as well.

The changes to the Media and Computers Services site here at Lied Library, which I described before, have gone live. There are still a lot of things I want to do with the site, but it needed a basic sprucing up. In conjuction with the newly revised site, my department has also launched a Media and Computer Services blog.

As I mentioned before, part of the reason I wanted to move Tombrarian to my own hosted site was to learn more about the inner workings of blogging and web design, so I do want to chronicle the changes I make along the way.

A few things I have done since moving Tombrarian:

1. Added the plugin FeedBurner Feed Stats. This only appears on the administrative side. I use the WordPress.com Stats plugin for Being and Formulating, but decided to try this plugin for Tombrarian since I’m using FeedBurner to get more thorough statistics.
2. Changed the permalink format to include date and post title.
3. Removed the yourminis widgets from the home page and added html code from FeedBurner. I want something on the homepage to show the latest posts from my two blogs. The yourminis widget was fine, but since I’m using FeedBurner, I decided to use code instead. Plus, I can have more control of the look so that they seem more a part of the site.

Before: yourminis widget

After: FeedBurner links

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been playing around with a self-hosted blog site. I was able to export the existing content from Tombrarian and import it into the new site very easily. The move was as simple as using the export feature of the existing site which generates an xml file and then using the import function of the new site. I expected moving content from one WordPress blog into another to be straight-forward, but it was even easier than I expected. The process probably took less then 2 minutes.

I’m glad I was able to transfer the content because I can maintain a complete run of Tombrarian and its short-lived predecessor dating back to April 2005.

So, this will be the last post for the WordPress hosted Tombrarain. I registered www.tombrarian.net. If you would like to continue following Tombrarian, please update your links and/or reader.

For a while, I have wanted to make some changes to Tombrarian. Mainly, I want to move it to my own host so that I have more control over look and functionality and to be able to learn more about CSS and other design options. A few months ago, I found a host (Bluehost) and began fooling around with a personal site. I created a space for Tombrarian and planned on moving it at the beginning of the year but got busy and never got to it. I am optimistic that I can get to it soon and figure the process itself is a topic worthy of Tombrarian. I want to learn from the process and can share that with other people who may be thinking of moving from a WordPress site to their own hosted site.

In chosing Bluehost, I picked a few brains for suggestions and a couple people recommended it, so I decided to go with it. Although I haven’t done much with the site yet, I have no complaints about Bluehost. It was easy enough to set-up and they have a desktop client that allows you to drag and drop files. The other option is to uplaod them through their website which is slow and burdensome if you have a lot of files to move. Bluehost supports WordPress and a few other blogs, so setting up a WordPress blog through Bluehost was very easy.

I chose the Blueline 1.0 theme because the CSS code seemed pretty straightforward and I tweaked the color scheme and some other basic elements. I’ll include an image in addition to the link because I am sure I will be changing it and want to preserve the changes to see how the site develops.

Speaking of the link, I secured http://www.tombrarian.net. It’s live now, but content free. After I play with the look a little more, I will try exporting the content from this site and upload it into the new site. So look for that move hopefully sooner rather than later.

I’m in it, so I guess I’m going to buy it. Very crafty Mr. Crawford. Very crafty

Quite a while ago, I set up a Google link alert so that I would get an email whenever someone linked to one of my blogs, and it worked as I had hoped. In the last couple of weeks or so, something changed and now I get an email whenever someone who has Tombrarian as part of their blogroll posts anything. Anyone else encounter this and know of a fix?

I noticed that WordPress added a feature whereby “Possibly Related Links” are automatically added to the bottom of my posts. My first reaction was that I did not want these links, especially since the first post to have them was my post about The King of Kong, which is about video game competitions. The “Possibly Related Links” showed links to King Kong, quite a different movie.

I found how to turn off the links (under Design and Extras). Turning off this option comes with the following language: “Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other’s blogs or get traffic that way.” Because the links were so off, I was not too concerned about shutting off the feature.

But I’ve been thinking about it and decided that I’m going to turn the feature back on, at least for a while to test it. I want to see what kind of links get generated and see if it actually does have an effect on my traffic.