On the outside, I try to project an image of having it all together. But underneath that, I'm kind of a disaster. Hence... the name of the site: GlossyVeneer. A can of worms…
That’s what I’ve opened here.
I started my blog way back in 2001, just because I’d read about tools that enabled people to self-publish in some tech magazines I’d received at work. I started with Blogger, before they were purchased by Google. The first postings were sporadic didn’t really contain much.
I kept my blog on their free blogspot hosting for a long time. But then I decided I wanted to move forward and put my blog on my own domain. I already owned a few domains, but I didn’t want to put it on a domain stamped with my own name. So I made up a new one. Hence, this site.
But even after moving to my own host, I kept publishing via Blogger. But lately, it has been driving me nuts. It’s slow and seems to have frequent troubles. If I needed to make a change that affected the entire blog, the system needed to republish the whole database and often it would timeout while attempting to do so. This was annoying, plus my whole blog was boring me. I started it because I found it kind of fun to tinker with the technology and that served me well in my career for a while. I enjoy meeting new people through it and keeping in touch with old friends as well, but truthfully it was a way for me to play with technology and to keep myself writing.
So I decided to move my blog into WordPress. That meant I wanted to move to a new host. GoDaddy was kind of frustrating to work with and the articles about attempting a WordPress install on their servers sounded like more tech-experimentation that I wanted to deal with. Bluehost seems a good alternative so far.
Since I decided to switch my publishing tool and my host, I decided I might as well shut the site down for the weekend. Just in an attempt to keep the process a little simpler.
Moving to WordPress has been a huge advantage over the way I used to publish. I used to maintain separate blogs to keep track of movies I’d been to, netflix rentals and books I’d read. Then I cobbled together a crummy javascript that included the output of those blog feeds into the sidebar of my blog. Now I’ve merged all the blogs into this one blog and I can include them over on the side using categories and the nifty sideblog plugin.
I started using Blogger before they had a comments feature. So I implemented Haloscan comments on my site. That was awesome because there is a certain amount of satisfaction of having feedback from your readers. But that also meant that I had to combine data from a couple different sources when moving into this set-up. Not a problem with a plugin from Justinsomnia.
So the site is back up and running. It’s not perfect, but that’s okay. It gives me things to work on. For example, the list of the archives is WAY too long and I’d like to figure out a nice organized archives page. I also need to work out some things with my RSS feeds to make sure that my feeds are going into FeedBurner correctly and that the FeedBurner feed is the one that is recognized on this site. I want to keep tweaking the design, because I’m using a template with a few minimal tweaks. I’m not sure how I feel about using a template because, given my profession, I should be able to create my own, but it was easier to get the site back up on its feet by utilizing a theme provided by someone else for now.
And lastly, the reason that I needed to get the site back online now is that I guess I’m going to commit to participation in NaBloPoMo. So I’m going to attempt to write every day in November. This should be interesting because I’ve got two trips planned and I always find it harder to post when I’m away from home. Wish me luck!
Weather Check: 63°
Song Playing Now: Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol 
3:55 PM Addition:
Justin came through for me again. His monthchunks plugin pulled my archives up into a much neater and compact format. Thanks Justin!
