“A change you can believe in”

I totally came up with that one myself.  

Okay, so if you are reading this post, you have noticed that the blog has changed dramatically.  For those of you that subscribe to our feed, you will have to resubscribe using the links at the upper right of the blog.  You now have 2 options for subscription: 1) you can subscribe to the posts like usual or 2) you can subscribe to the comments feed.  #1 will be nothing different for most of you.  #2 are for those of you who would like to know when people are commenting.  There seem to be some performance issues with the site and the web hosting right now, so if you notice anything that is probably why.  Shortcuts to the feed are 1) http://TheUntitledTitlePage.com/feed/ and 2) http://TheUntitledTitlePage.com/comments/feed/.

One good thing about these new feeds is that they publish the ENTIRE blog and comments, not just the past 25 like most blogging engines.

I could go on for hours about the changes to the blog, so maybe I will, maybe I won’t, we’ll just have to see how much I put into this post.  It’s a work in progress, but I have been working on it for a good month or two now, I just wanted something a little fancier for Emily, and I wanted to have more control over things.  I did not go the route of actually having my own server host it ala the St. Clairs, but with the performance issues I’m seeing from our web host, don’t think I am not thinking about it.  :)

Okay, so we’ve gone over the feeds, let’s go to the top left of the page.  There we have some new pages and categories.  If there is a post or more in a category, it’ll appear up top.  So if you want to see everything under Morgan, you can just go to Family -> Morgan and get your fix.

You will notice that I was able to import everything over from our old Blogger blog.  This was, of course, a little bit of an ordeal, but I’ll give a shout out to a little application I was able to track down to convert a Blogger export file to a Wordpress file for importing.  It is called Blogger 2 Wordpress and it does exactly as named.  For those of you that use Blogger, under the Settings -> Basic page, there is a link to export blog.  What that does is create a Blogger specific XML file of all of your posts and comments.  They just recently rolled this out to users.  Part of us moving to a new blog and getting more control over things means that I needed a blogging solution that I could host myself.  What that means, is that not only are our files and photos on our server (and not Bloggers) but so is the actual blog engine itself.  There are a few solutions out there, but after a while investigating, the best seemed to be self-hosted Wordpress.  It is an open-source platform, which means you are free to change what you want and how you want it, plus a ton of people are out there making themes and plugins for it.  It always seemed a little difficult to find a good amount of themes and plugins to use on our Blogger blog, especially plugins that would work outside of being hosted on Blogger.  Okay, so Wordpress can import Blogger blogs, but of course, for some unknown reason, ours wouldn’t import.  In come the Blogger 2 Wordpress application.  I was able to take that Blogger export XML file, throw it into that little web-hosted application, and voila, a Wordpress XML file all ready for importing.  OF COURSE since we have over 200 posts, it would only import 90 or so at a time, so I would have to run import a few times, but other than that it was pretty easy.  We are slowly going through and adding our old posts to categories and properly tagging them, so that will take a while.

As you can see as you scroll down the left, you will see a Search Box..  Then we have a snapshot of our 5 most recent posts.  Pretty straigh forward.  Below that are recent photos we have uploaded to our Flickr stream.  We will be publishing all of our photos to Flickr now.  Why?  Well, they have a better unlimited usage plan that Picasa, and it’s always good to have an online backup of what you have on your computer in case of an earthquake or who knows what.  We’ll slowly be uploaded pictures to that, and of course all of the photos we put into our posts will be hosted there as well.

Next we have the Tag Cloud.  As I mentioned, we will be going through all of our old posts and tagging and categorizing them.  As we find new categories, the links on the top of the blog will grow.  Ans our a keyword is tagged, it will appear in the Tag Cloud.  The bigger the link, the more it has been tagged.  So you can see what we blog about the most, or the least.

Now come the polls.  The first one will be what people think about the new blog.  It’ll change every now and then, if Emily doesn’t like it, we’ll remove it.  So it’s there for now, but who knows, maybe we’ll have new polls sometimes, maybe we won’t for a while.  It’s dynamic like that.

Of course we had to continue to include translation for our friends and family overseas.  It defaults to Italian, that should be a surprise to nobody.  :)

Finally on the left, we have another link to Archives but broken out by month.  It also shows you the number of posts in that month, so that’s cool.  There is also the option to show you a calendar with what days you posted highlighted, but what if you post every day?  Then you just have a highlighted calendar, and I thought that didn’t make any sense.

Okay, on to the right side.  We have a bunch of link categories.  Actually, they are Google Reader folders that we set up for a bunch of feeds we are interested in.  If you are not on there but would like to be, it’s because I missed putting you in.  Drop us a line on the Contact Us page and we can do a little “you add us we’ll add you” peace agreement action.  As we add/remove feeds, you’ll see the changes magically reflected before your eyes.  These are a work in progress because they appear to slow down the loading of the blog in general, so give us some feedback whether you like them or not.  Maybe you’ll sway us in one direction, maybe you won’t.  ;)

Well, I guess that’s really it for the right side.  The Site Administration section is for us to login and post and do stuff like that.  It also has a handy dandy extra set of links for the feeds.

As you view the posts, you’ll notice that we now have ratings, 1-5 stars.  Maybe you people only care about when we blog about Morgan and when Emily talks about crafts.  This will help us know, and may give you a better sense of what others find interesting or just plain boring.

Comments can now be threaded.  What that means is that not only can you comment on a post, but you can comment on a comment.  So you can start little conversations in there too if you want.

There are also a bunch of handy little icons at the bottom of each post to help you bookmark and share if you want.  Avid blog readers seem to find that useful, so I thought hey, might as well.  It looks cool anyway.

Each post will also show you what category(ies) it lies within as well as what we have tagged it as.  Again, just makes it easier for you to find related content and for us to sort of “bucket” everything, rather than just having a blog of “stuff.”

So, we hope you like what we’ve added.  If you don’t, we can always make changes.  So let us know what you think, and if you see any problems, drop me a line and we’ll work on them.  We have new “hosted” email addresses specifically for blog communication too.  Thanks to our friends over at Google, you can now reach us at Emily@TheUntitledTitlePage.com and Adrian@TheUntitledTitlePage.com.

Oh yeah, so we have a new domain name too.  We still have AdrianAndEmily.com but now it will redirect to TheUntitledTitlePage.com.  So please, update your feed readers and your bookmarks.  You will be forwarded here if you navigate to AdrianAndEmily.com but your feed probably won’t work anymore.  :)

I think that’s about all I can remember for now.  Sweet.