Thursday 29 September 2011

Moving home

I've decided to up sticks and migrate this blog to a nice new home. It won't happen for a few weeks, but a bit of notice never hurt anyone.

A couple of years ago I registered the domain grahamnunn.net with the intention of showcasing my talents to the world. I even built a website:

Which looked pretty good until I realised that 'showcasing' means that you need to be proud of the things you've done, and that didn't apply to 99% of my output. I scrapped the project but kept the domain, which ever since has been sat there, giving me the sad eyes, waiting for deployment.

My plan is to use it as the basis of a new Wordpress powered site. Over the past couple of weeks I've been teaching myself how to built a Wordpress theme from scratch and found it surprisingly enjoyable, so it feels like the right time to finally roll out grahamnunn.net. Naturally I've given this very little thought and still have no idea how I'm going to populate the site, but I'm sure you've all come to expect style over substance from me by now.

I haven't started it yet, and have no idea what it will look like, but I just wanted to tell you that the end is nigh for New Trash Radio. You all thought that was a rubbish name for a blog anyway, didn't you?

5 comments:

Ben said...

I didn't really understand "New Trash Radio" but I've heard worse names. Did you know Google was originally called "Backrub"?

Anyway, I look forward to seeing what you do with Wordpress. I moved from Blogger to Wordpress a while ago, because the mobile-aspect is better. It's got better mobile themes than Blogger, and there's an app for posting stuff on the move. I wrote a few blog posts while on holiday in Ibiza last year, using just my phone. I'm a fool. It cost me a fortune in data charges.
But I did get to do a poor joke about a bidet, and take pictures of lizards.
If you don't have iPhone/Android, there's various plugins that let you email stuff from whatever you have access to, and have it posted as a blog (though that's probably possible with blogger too). Even Twitter - my pictures show up on my site instead of Twitpic/Yfrog/whoever - which is nice.

And the search engine optimisation is amazing. I can hardly believe I just typed those words, either.
I can write a blog post about something, search for that subject half an hour later, and it's right there in Google. People actually leave me comments. Sometimes.

The only thing I miss from Blogger is the ease of design. As someone who sorta-half-understands bits of HTML and some CSS, I've relied on other peoples' templates and plugins in Wordpress, sometimes with bizarre and unexpected consequences.
And the post editor on Wordpress could be better.

Graham said...

Wordpress is a lot more customisable, particularly for comments. The Blogger comment pages are generic and clumsy. I can't imagine ever being so desperate to blog that I have to do it on my phone, but then I don't do much that's blogworthy. And I'm at home more than most people.

Some Wordpress elements are a pain to style, CSS wise, but worth the effort.

Ariane said...

Do you know, I am ridiculously unobservant and hadn't realised you'd pimped up your current Blogger site with a funky header, etc? By which I mean, I dimly knew it was Blogger (because of the address) and I knew it looked cool, but I hadn't twigged that the two coexisted.

You know what I'm going to ask now, don't you...?

Graham said...

Yes. You want to know why I don't have a blog header as awesome as yours.

Ariane said...

Yes, that was it.