Shane Life

I’m two-thirds of the way through NaBloPoMo. I haven’t missed a day yet, although it was touch-and-go yesterday…got it in just under the wire.

We’ve covered Obama, Bond, Top Chef, and lots of other fun stuff.

Tonight, I’m going to talk about software.

I’ve been a very diligent WordPress user for just over two-thirds of the time that I have written in this space. When I first started, I used Blogger, but that was a pretty short experience once I got my own domain.

There are a plethora of services for this thing we call blogging out there and some I’ve even tried. For example, I use Textpattern to run most of my content management sites like my freelance business site and my church site.

If you pay close attention to this site (which I’m not sure if you do), you might notice that I’ve changed the header on my site (shown in the title bar of your broswer) from I, Shane to Shane Life. You might wonder why. Well, a while back, I reserved this domain with the intent of migrating my blog from this space to there. I’ve been piggybacking off of my freelance domain ever since I started hosting my own blog and I thought that the domain I found was good enough to merit the move.

This move, however, is not without effort. First, if I were to stick with WordPress for shanelife.com, my archived database backup for this site is massive. In fact, it’s larger than WordPress allows you to import. Now there are ways around it, but thus far, I haven’t been able to make that work. Second, I’ve got advertising on this site (those little text ads in the upper right corner of the home page). It doesn’t pay me much, but it is enough to cover random online impulses and iTunes music. The approval process to get in as a new advertiser…well, I just don’t think I would qualify these days. Since I got in early on, things like “readership” and “page-hits” and “Alexa Score” were less important. With the ubiquitousness of blogs in the current market, I’d probably get rejected flat out if I were to migrate. Like I said, it’s not an amount worth writing home about, but it’s something that I’d love to keep.

Then, there’s the matter of choosing a software to run the blog. I like WordPress a lot, but with each subsequent release, it gets a little bit slower, a little more bloated. I like the clean, zippy interface of Tumblr and I’m comfortable enough with Textpattern to make it bend to my will, but WordPress is great for what it does, which is run a blog.

So I’ve come full circle. Perhaps I don’t do anything with shanelife.com, although that would be kinda silly. I really like the domain name a lot…I just wish there wasn’t so much baggage that came with switching a URL. Whatever I do, I’ll keep you updated. If I do switch, you feed readers won’t notice a thing…it’ll be the folks like Alli who like to come directly to the site that will have to get used to it. I’ll be here at least through the end of November…you know, for continuity’s sake. After that…you’ll just have to wait and see.