Sunday, January 17, 2016

I'm Staying on Blogger with More Comments

Looking forward to summer, fish on and conversation. Joe played this hybrid striper long enough that Jim and Donna settled into talking in the background about whatever.

Going on two months ago, I wondered if it's possible to migrate a blog from Blogger to WordPress. I had never heard or read of it being done, but it seemed surely there's a way to rewrite code. Next time online, I googled to find out plenty people have and do, and I began researching while assuming it would be too costly to hire someone.

Well, it's not very costly, about two hundred bucks. I just think, after all my efforts at understanding the process, it's not necessary that Litton's Lines go to WordPress. When I begin a literary blog it will be different, a blog that explores possibilities for my first novel, makes sense of what this novel will be in the cultural scene today, markets it, but above all persuades readers to my vision as well as invites them to take a different perspective. I don't like to think of people as a market as I like to think of them as individuals. I will begin this blog on a self-domain in WordPress, and I may suffer a lot of headaches for this. In five years of Blogger the site's been down just once. I read about 99.96% as an excellent uptime figure, but that means the site is down three or four times a year!

I don't want to lose a single post, nor a single digit of the social share numbers, and I've been informed it's possible some posts get lost during the transfer, and not one of the services I've reviewed mentions social share numbers retained. In the meantime, I finally got the Google + gizmo fixed. That was simple, I just had to change it to a different form. Once the number hit 600, it reversed. Every time someone tried to share, the gizmo subtracted a number. I tried before I changed it, and it didn't even allow me to share. So that's fixed. I also found out that all this time, comments have been possible only to people Google registered! So how many of you who have tried and been refused, I don't know. Sorry about that! Chalk it up to inexperience with techy stuff. Now anyone can comment easily, and I hope you do. I know a lot of you guys and gals read this blog as a local source, but until today, never knew I could open it up better than I had it set.

One caveat. I don't yet know if I'm going to merge the blog with Google +. So far, I understand it needs to have a shared author profile. No problem there. But it might be that if I incorporate comments from Google +, once again, only registered users can comment. I hope that's only true in Google + itself. I place blog posts in a number of Google + communities and reply to more comments there, than in this blog itself, so I do want to incorporate those comments and make this platform more of a community. I will always answer comments, as I always have.

So we're off to another good year and I promise you that before I begin work on that novel again, I'll finish my book on fishing. Actually, I have a second book on fishing in the works, too, and intend to finish it before I return to the novel, also. I find writing an extremely compelling act, but if not for fishing, I guess I would just be another nerd. That description has never suited me.