Beyond that, there are a number of things that I would like to do going forward that I simply cannot do easily with Blogger, but I can do very easily if I have control over the site. I'm far more comfortable writing html, javascript and server-side code than I will ever be at bending Blogger to my will.
I'm sure there will be some speedbumps, but I think this is a much better solution for me, and ultimately, for you, readers. I'm nowhere near finished, but I think I've got the essentials ironed out, so I'm going to go ahead with the switch-over.
Things that should still work:
- Existing links to my page should still be valid, at least for content. I've put in quite a bit of effort trying to get the old-style Blogger urls to play nicely with my new site
- All of the old content has been imported.
- Images should still be fine, since those were all externally hosted and I haven't swapped those out yet. Eventually, I'd like to serve all my screenshots locally, so I can convert them to jpegs so pages will load faster (most are loss-less PNGs right now).
- Comments are disabled for the moment. Extracting the primary content from Blogger was enough of a pain, so I haven't bothered with the old comments yet. I also need to add server-side support for comments. If you have any questions about any of the tutorials in the meantime, at the top of each post is a link with my name that will allow you to send me an email. I'll try to get back to you as quickly as I can.
- Rss feeds - From my analytics, I don't think anybody actually used the blog feed that Blogger provided, but I'm not going to bother with implementing one for the new site unless there is some demand or I have some spare time and get inspired.
- Some of the older posts might look a little wonky. I'm going through them as I have time and making sure that the content I extracted from Blogger renders decently, but it is time-consuming. Particularly some of the oldest posts, when I was still using the online Blogger editor, before I standardized my workflow on Windows Live Writer, may be a little bit off.
Visit the new site!