Well, what do you think of the new look? I had done so much customisation on the old template that it had become a bit unwieldy so I thought it was time to freshen things up on this page. I hope you like this version. Please let me know if you spot any blips that need fixing and I’ll do my best to get everything spick and span over the next few weeks. I’ve also been revamping my book club site, www.izzyreads.com and am looking forward to having a bit more time to catch up on my reading in the coming weeks. First, though, I have a bit of sorting out to do over there on the images front …
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After a week of evenings spent on the laptop and more than one missed dinner, I am starting to think that blogging may be the new way to lose weight. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Logging on every night and watching the pounds melt away! I guess I’ll find out the bitter truth when I go the gym at the weekend, but for the moment, my hopes are high. At a rough guess I would estimate I’m about 3000 calories down this week so far – surely that must mean a pound or two lighter on the scales? Of course I’ve managed to maintain the wine intake but then, that’s purely medicinal, the resveratrol being a necessity for certain women of uncertain age who are trying to keep the arteries clear in the run up to menopause. It was never going to be an ordinary day. The first sign the world is on its head was a news story in the freesheet they hand out on the train every morning. Murder most Fowl, screamed the headline in a tale that told of a fox slaughtered by a group of chickens. This is not the natural order. Later in the day, news broke that the government is upping the retirement age. This is bad news for Izzy who is already exhausted from working for the last 30 years. Now it seems I am facing an additional two or three and, to add insult to injury, I’ll have less money all round since pensions are not what pensions used to be. What is a woman to do? Scrimp and save in anticipation of the harsh lean years that lie ahead? Or spend, spend, spend on the vices like alcohol, red meat, chocolate since the fewer the years of penury perhaps the better? Such serious musings are as unnatural as those hens and the fox. Shudder. Bring on the morrow. Like many bloggers, I started out on blogger.com and, over a period of time, built up some content and added some widgets. But, even from the beginning, I wasn’t really sold on the blogspot.com address. Somehow it didn’t seem like a proper home.So, after mulling it over for several weeks, I took the plunge and decided to purchase a domain and hosting and bring the blog to a new platform. This would give me more control, a better website name, and potentially a better way to track my visitors and assess interest in my content. So, how did I do it? The first step was to decide on a host. Being based in Ireland, my preference was for a local company and, having more one than one blog, I also wanted to be able to host more than one site on whatever platform I opted for. I also wanted to be able to purchase and maintain my domains. After a bit of research, I opted for Blacknight and so, over the space of a weekend, I purchased my domains and hosting. So far, so good. The next step was to set up the blogs and, ideally, to import the content from my previous blogspot sites. Blacknight has a vault of web apps and offers a couple of blogging options inlcuding WordPress and Movabletype. I installed both and played with them before deciding to go with WordPress as it seemed to have more plugins and widgets. The next step was to choose a template that would accommodate some of the features that are close to my heart like Google Adsense, Google Analytics, a decent archive, and good categorisation and tagging. After a bit of a hunt around, I found a template that seemed to tick the necessary boxes and uploaded it. Next came the content issue and, to my surprise, my setup provided an Import option that brought all the content across from blogger without any problems whatsoever. So, within quite a short space of time, I had a domain, a working site, and content. The next step involved putting in place Google Adsense, Google Analytics and Google Site Verfication. I found plugins for the first two, and the last one just involved putting some code into the ‘head’ section of the site which I did by editing the Header under Appearance from within WordPress. All fairly straighforward. The final step was tweaking the stylesheet and a bit of HTML editing here and there to change headings, fonts, and so on. For anyone considering a similar move, I hope this short blog post will be useful. I am not a techie person but not entirely clueless either. From that standpoint, I found the process fairly logical. Yes, I hit a few hitches along the way – like stupidly putting the Google Analytics code from my old site on the new site before realising that I would, of course, need a new code if I wanted to track the traffic from both sites. But hitches like this were relatively few and minor and fairly easy to resolve. Was the venture worth it? I think so. For a fairly modest financial outlay and about a day’s worth of tweaking, I have a new site with all my original content up and running on my own domain. I know a lot of you don’t like Sunday evenings because they signal the end of the weekend but, for me, these last few years they have become my favourite part of the week – that time when the chores are done, the house is relatively clean, the fridge is well-stocked, and I can light some candles, pour a glass of wine, and sit down quietly to listen to some music, or the radio, or maybe even to read. Today has been especially sweet because the last few days have been tiring, not least because of the mental gymnastics involved in moving the blog. You know I still haven’t quite figured out where I went wrong: Izzy Muses is here fine and dandy at www.izzymuses.com but my other little project, Izzy Reads, seems to have a gone awry in the creation phase so that now, it can only be accessed from www.izzyreads.com/wordpress – forget the slash wordpress and you’re going to end up here. Quite how I managed that, I really can’t say. On the plus side, I did manage to sort out Google Webmaster Tools for site verification, I did manage to set up my Google Adsense although not without hitting some snags, I did manage to enable Google Analytics, again not without a hitch or two en route. On the minus side, don’t you find the text a bit small in this new ‘skin’? I’ve done everything I can think of to sort it out but it’s still not exactly as I’d want it. Still, heigh ho. For a non-technie fifty-something, I think I’ve done okay. So, here I am on Sunday night, back on the keyboard, albeit briefly, to reassure myself that everything is still working and typing by candlelight because the light in my kitchen blew about a month ago and is still not fixed. The other candles lighting here this evening, are I am pleased to say for atmosphere more than for lighting. All is calm, all is partly bright and that includes your blogger, Izzy, by candlelight, on the Sunday night. |
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