Andrew Still in the House

One of my resolutions for 2011 is to review the ridiculously large number of blogs I have, and to decide what to do with each of them. I’ll use the tag toomanyblogs for posts related to this exercise. This is the first such post.

This blog goes first because I just got an email from a fellow Andrew who would like andrew.wordpress.com. I just replied with no: a polite no, I hope, but still a no. I haven’t posted here since 2008, and each of the last few posts has been a little trial of some feature or other.

But andrew is my name, and I’m glad to have been early enough into wordpress.com to get andrew.wordpress.com. And I like some of the early content. For example, in 2005, I described wordpress.com as a “gateway drug” to self-hosted WordPress. I remarked that the way out should be well signposted. One commenter saw an implication with which he disagreed.

A ‘fee’ on exporting your blog account to somewhere else? Isn’t that too far fetched?

Six years later, Automattic announced guided transfers, at $99 a time.

So, although I have too many blogs, I’m keeping this one.

Paragraphs

Do html paragraph tags work?

Let’s see.

Seeding Way

The previous post means that I’m trying out Prologue

Prologue

WordPress.com in Twitter-like clothing…

Is This Theme Tag-Aware?

I’m currently using Garland, and wondering if it will display the tags I’m putting on this post.

Update: it did. I started a post on the support forum to keep track of which themes are tag-aware. Garland is. Sandbox is now, although it wasn’t when I first made this post. At the time of this update, I’m using the Sandbox theme.

Thanks For Making It Snappy

Jolly words from Santa Matt:

On a limited number of blogs, about 10% we’re testing out a plugin that allows you to have Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA for short) enabled on your blog. SPA is a little widget that shows people a preview of the page on the other end of a link when they hover over it for a few seconds.

I am among the 10%… perhaps I was good this year after all…

May be Moving Here

I keep on thinking about moving my main blog here. Now that WordPress.com supports domain mapping I could point changingway.net to this blog and be up and running again (although there are of course issues of exporting and importing data).

My current host is weblogs.us, which is currently crippled by spam. Hence andwat.weblogs.us, to which changingway currently points, hasn’t been available for a few days now. JD Hodges, founder of weblogs.us, is handling the situation with his usual grace, but it’s tough.

Signpost in the Desert

Yes, things have been very quiet here for a while. I’ve been rather less quiet at other blogs, particularly:

• Changing Way, my main blog
• The Way to MU, which is about WordPress Multi-User, and includes a list of sites at which WPMU is running

I plan, sometime soon (whatever that means) to use this blog as a playground for widgets.

Importing From Blogger to WordPress.com

When I switched from Blogger to WordPress, I did not import the content of my old blog, Blogging on the Free Web (BFW, from this point on). Since Blogger/Blogspot is free, I decided to leave the old content there. I didn’t take much more than a cursory glance at the guides to migrating from Blogger to WordPress.

I recently noticed on the dashboard of my WordPress.com blog that there’s an Import option. A little further investigation showed that it does indeed import from Blogger to WordPress.com.

So I created a new BFW at WordPress.com, went to Import, and pointed it at the existing BFW at Blogger. A few minutes later, the posts and comments were in the new blog. It didn’t import the template, and hence didn’t import the sidebar, but that’s fine.

At a cursory glance, the content had been imported cleanly. At a slightly less cursory glance, flickr-y posts such as this one are a little messed up. I’ll leave both BFWs around for the forseeable future as an example of an import from Blogger.

All in all, though, well done to the WordPress.com folks on the import tool. I’m not sure how available it is to other WordPress and WPMU sites.