After 9 years on Blogspot/Blogger, I’ve finally made the transition to a completely self-hosted blog ala WordPress. Blogger served me well for that time, but the newer templates were not intuitive or comprehensive, didn’t grant the precise control I wanted, and the older template was, well, old. Doing something as simple as making post titles link to post pages was not possible without custom scripting.
Currently there are still some broken and unfinished things.
- Comments
The comments work, even if they look hideous and are kind of unreadable. Ultimately I’d like to merge the oldest comments in – these are from the days when I used a third-party pop-up commenting system (because Blogspot didn’t have commenting, in the beginning).
- Post formatting
Practically all of the posts transferred with minimal harm, but some formatting was lost – mostly bold and italics, some spacing, and so on. Nothing that will make anything unreadable. I’m fixing these errors as I find them.
- Categories & tags
I’m slowly making my way through all of my posts adding categories and tags. It’ll be a while before I complete that for all 630 posts, but it’s an exciting feature to unlock. You’ll be able to select “high school” and immediately see all of the posts from that time period. I feel a little queasy knowing that all of that material is going to be much easier to browse, but I’ve promised myself (and others) not to hide the shame of my past. It is good not to forget.
- Old image links
I’ll also be attempting to restore the broken image links in older posts – such as, for example, the once-popular Iraq prison camp post. I still have all of the original images for my previous posts, but they still need to be uploaded and then the URLs updated.
There’s more, too, but I’m out of time for the moment.