Stray Dog Strut

After a delicious snack(i) and a near fatal accident in the bathroom(ii), I’ve had some time to mull over this whole overhaul of my blog.

I’m really swaying between keeping my blog on blogger (with downloadable files hosted with my webhost) and just taking the plunge and building a completely new website from scratch (with EVERYTHING hosted with my webhost).

While the second approach does seem a tad drastic (and a monumental effort really), it’s actually really tempting. I think I have enough content (or future content atleast) to be able to justify a whole website – the reason I started a blog was originally because of the lack of content to fill a whole site. I just wonder how easy it would be to make it act like a blog (posts, archiving etc), but I have no doubt that with a little patience it can be done (one approach being free/open source weblog software although this may be far too technical for my needs).

*EDIT* After reading around, I may be able to get my head around installing WordPress on my hosts server (the free weblog tool, not the blogging service at wordpress.com), which looks like a really nice way to run a blog.

I’m thinking this way based on all the cool tutorials i’ve been reading all over the place (not to mention the cool design tutorials at Veerle’s blog, a favourite site of mine for some time now) with lots of features I want to add to my site. The main reason I’m drifting away from blogger now is because of the importance of really being in control and ‘owning’ my content, not to mention working on my professional image=)

Don’t expect any changes too soon, in fact redesigning my website will most likely be done in the background, and only uploaded when complete (if I go down that road). Still, I would like to hear people’s thoughts on this – what works for you?

I found a pretty useful site in my travels: Kuler by Adobe helps you generate colour themes, useful for designing websites. You can either create schemes by selecting colours or, even easier, upload an image and fiddle with different preset moods and custom selections to generate a scheme. A quick fiddle with my header resulted in the following:

(i) Wholemeal bread laden with sweet sticky syrup – yum!=)
(ii) FallingStar left her Lush soap in the bottom of the shower which became slippery when wet, sending me sprawling, narrowly missing the wall tiles with my head=S

When I last had a website (www.bebopfunk.com, started as part of a college assessment in 2004), I stored all my content on my webhost’s server: pages, images etc. Simple. Now that i’m using blogger i’m getting more than a little confused (Possibly not the right word, more ‘contemplative’ atleast).

For starters, while my old blog address straydogstrutt.blogspot.com/ redirects to the new domain name fine and, afaik, has been set up correctly (pinging works fine and checking the redirect returns the expected result), it seems my new address is nowhere to be found when searching google, yahoo etc. However, I believe this is simply because Google’s webcrawlers haven’t documented the new address yet so i’m not too concerned.

More moustache twisting though: At the moment my blog is still hosted by Blogger and I only have the aforementioned domain name to redirect to. However, pretty soon I intend to add some webspace (soon as my paycheck clears, heh) so that I can host my own files (future game projects and other media etc). Now this is where I reach a crossroads. Afaik, if I tell Blogger to start publishing to this new location (I assume, via the FTP option which incidentally means reverting to a classic template), it will only publish the new content, not all my existing blog posts, and unless i’m missing something obvious, the general Google murmur seems to be that you have to copy and paste it all yourself!!

See, I still want to keep my, soon to be upgraded, blogger template and all it’s blog functionality (comments, post history etc), so i’m not sure what the best approach is. Of course, I could just put the aforementioned files on my webhosts server, keep my blog with Blogger, and just link to those files from there – i’m assuming I would also be able to add extra pages to my blog in this way too by copying over the template to maintain continuity (The ‘creating a blog for each page’ approach seems utterly pointless). This approach would probably be simplest, and I suspect this is maybe how Habboi hosts his files (Spencer The Spinnin’ Spider)?=)

*EDIT* Rather than creating seperate pages on my host’s server, it may be easier to use the ‘post pages’ approach, however this may be limiting in terms of what javascript functionality I can use in a post? I think I might try out a few tests later today=)

It would mean the least affect on my blog as I could just continue posting through Blogger which is nice and quick, and still fiddle with the template in the blogger interface. But still there is an attractive sense of security in keeping all my files in one place incase they ever made drastic changes to the Blogging contract, especially as I’ve noticed since the domain redirect that my profile picture doesn’t always show now (It’s above the 400px limit I believe, but Blogger says thumbnails should show?).

But then if I abandon Blogger completely, I assume i’d have to create manual posts directly through my website unless I invest some time in researching an easier publishing method (Maybe it’s time to finally use Cyberduck=) ), but that seems more hassle than it’s worth given the ease with which I can create posts on Blogger and the sense of community here.

Oh well, I have more questions than answers it seems, but I’ll muddle through=)

While on the subject of blogs, I found this nice listing of ‘excellent blogger templates’. While I want to make my own design as much as possible rather than download a pre-made template, it’s nice to get some inspiration=)

Registered a domain name which miraculously seems to be working (redirecting my blog address to this new address). Also discovered that Straydogstrut.com is already registered but unused and http://straydogstrut.blogspot.com/ has only 1 post from way back in 2003…such a waste!

Oh well, onwards and upwards. Pretty soon I’ll be adding some webspace and really moving things around a bit.

Until then..