Sunday, May 16, 2010

Blog Maintenance

A few weeks ago, I was up to my ears in my CPE application, schoolwork, ordination papers and graduation paperwork.  In a state of exhaustion I started to think about some of the things I wanted to do once I was into a CPE program, graduated and finished with my ordination papers.  Do you ever do that?  I know it doesn't change what needs to get done - or actually accomplish what needs to be done - but it helps me relax and actually focus.

Anyway - one of the things I wanted to do was do a little maintenance to my blog.  I started this blog two and a half years ago as a way to connect to my friends and family that were so far away from me.  At the time, I didn't know what HTML code was, I couldn't figure out how to upload a photo as my header and I was more excited than I probably should have been when I figured out how to insert a link into a word or phrase.

I think it's safe to say that I've come a long way since then.  I have spent many hours googling 'blogger help', poured through other blogs for ideas and asked anyone who seemed like they had a clue question after question.  It's been fun to learn and I think my blog is better as a result.

There were a couple of things that were driving me nuts, though.  I wanted to get my recipes organized, dig around and find sermons and prayers that could be accesses easier, etc. etc.  So I started working on it this weekend.

First of all, I realized on Friday night (what, doesn't everybody blog on Friday nights?  No?  Just me?  Okay, moving on) that Blogger now allows you to create pages!  Right now you can only create 10, but that is still an improvement from before.  So far I have created a Recipes page and a DIY Projects page.  Before when you clicked on the tabs at the top you had to dig through archived posts to find what you were looking for.  Now (and this is more relevant for the Recipes page, since I only have two DIY projects up right now) you go to one page and click directly on the recipe that you want.  Hooray organization!

Eventually I will organize some of the sermons and prayers that I posted, but at the moment I'm not sure that I even labeled them so I am going to have to do some digging in order to find them.

Also - and this is something that Bruce has been encouraging me to do for awhile - I finally bought my own domain!  You can now access my blog with the address, www.thestrengthoffaith.com.  I have been looking into this for awhile (Sarah and I are looking at getting a domain for our other blog, so we've been doing lots of research on the subject), but decided to pull the plug on Saturday morning.  I realized after I went through the process and clicked 'buy' that I really had no clue what I was doing - and at one point during the 'transition' I was convinced I had killed my blog forever.

It was at that point that I decided to go for a long walk and by the time I came back things were starting to work again.  I did, however, manage to lose all of my blog lists in the process.  I tried to build them up again this afternoon, but I may have missed some.  If you see that you're missing, just let me know!

I was worried that online readers (google reader, blogger reader, facebook feed, etc.) wouldn't update with the new URL, but apparently it still did (thank you Katie for reassuring me on Saturday night and convincing me I could do the switch myself).  The new domain is set up to re-direct from the old blogspot URL, but if you follow in google reader or have me on one of your blog lists, you may want to update the link (just in case).

Oh - that brings me to another point.  I think (and always remember that when I am talking technology, take everything I say with a grain of salt) that my old blogspot URL will always redirect to the new domain.  So if you have that saved it shouldn't be a problem.  However - it might take up to three days for this to work for everyone, so you may still see "blogspot" for a day or two.

Phew.  I'm sure it's not that complicated.

Anyway, enough about me and my overly-pampered blog.  How was your weekend?

2 comments:

  1. Thank You!!!

    okay soooo you totally can NOT talk about how awesome your blog is with the new "pages" organization without explaining it to the rest of us??!!!!!!???!!!! lol

    YAY for you owning your own domain :) that's awesome!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great job! I think you are very tech savvy :) Looking forward to Wear a Dress Tuesday!

    ReplyDelete

Hello and thanks for commenting! Unless I have your email address, I respond to all questions directly in the comment form. Check back if you've asked one! xo, Sarah

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