I moved my Blog to DonTai.com

Today I moved my blog from dontai.Wordpress.com to my own hosting space on Site5, primarily because I wanted to experiment with the dizzying variety of themes and plugins. WordPress.com was gracious enough to host me, but I think I was about to outstay my welcome. I wanted to download themes and install plugins, which i could not do. The basic functionality was there, but flexibility was not.

I sure was not disappointed. I only got around to looking at the first 10 pages of themes, and the first 10 pages of plugins. There sure are a number of very busy WordPress themers out there.

The move was painless. A simple export and my data was downloaded. Another simple import and my data was uploaded. Starting and configuring WordPress was really easy. The work started when I began looking at themes.

It’s difficult to get a variable width 2 column theme. It really is. I did not want the banner to be overly large, for the sake of precious screen real estate. I also did not want a dark background with a dark font, resulting in minimal brightness contrast. It’s just harder for everyone to see. Cool, yes, but not good web usability.

I settled for the theme “Default-Enhanced”. While I am unsure of the origins of the graphic, the layout suits be very well. Navigation is boxes has a light blue background, showing some contrast from the main content area. Headlines are in red and really stand out. The included widgets should do me well for a while. I do like the “tag cloud”.

I tried other themes. Tarski had an interesting banner graphic but was fixed width. Sunset met with approval from the elder weed, but was too orange for my taste. I did like the flexible width, though. Maiden-Voyage was fixed width, with a very sunny flower graphic, was judged to be too flowery for me.

I downloaded and installed a couple of plugins. AJAX seemed a good idea and should help me speed up editing, but after I installed it I did not see much difference. More experimentation is probably needed. It’s a little complex. The Askimet plugin was a no-brainer; Who does not want less spam, and I already had a WordPress.com ID, so what they hey. I added a plugin to upload and store my photo. That was standard on WordPress.com. The plugin “Post Teaser” is pretty useful, truncating your post to 100 words and adding a link to the full article, the number of words and how long it would take to read the article. I like it a lot.

I’ll let it run for a while and see how it shakes out. My RSS aggregators have been updated and the overnight CRON jobs should run and pick up my new site tomorrow. In all it’s been pretty painless, no-eventful and even a tad boring, all thanks to the very smart architecture of WordPress. Many thanks to the designers.

Foresight is when you think of your customers long before you or they know you will meet. WordPress is great software.