I’m considering moving my blog over to pieceofshep.com. This was where my blog was originally set up long ago (maybe four years ago). The domain fits better with my blog’s title obviously. The only thing I’m worried about is what’s going to happen to all the search engine referrals. I can use an .htaccess rewrite to forward the URLs from mikeschepker.com to pieceofshep.com and that should work ok. I just need to figure out what rules I need to 301 mikeschepker.com/blog/wp-permalink-structure to pieceofshep.com/wp-permalink-structure. I have some good searches on my site and would not like to lose that incoming traffic. This may take some research. If anyone has suggestions, let me know.
Last night and today, with the help of the good folks in the Habari community, I ported the PhoenixBlue theme that I released for WordPress over to Habari. You can check the theme out in action over at MikeSchepker.net and download it from here: Download PhoenixBlue for Habari Now
I’m sure there are some things that aren’t quite up to snuff, so if you want to throw in a helping hand and join a community of passionate coders and designers, visit Habari’s website or join us on irc at irc.freenode.net in the #habari channel.
I’m back to using WordPress for now. This is nothing against Habari. I’m just not ready for it. I spent several hours for a few days trying to get things to work the way I wanted them to. The Habari community was extremely helpful and I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did without them. My thanks to them. I just felt bad constantly asking for help. I’m not a coder. I manage to get by. I also had to constantly modify themes to get them to work (or to get them to work how I wanted them to work) and to look right in various browsers. I’m still excited to use it, but it will probably be a bit before that happens, not because their product isn’t stable, but because I’m not. ;)
Dmondark in #habari did me a huge favor and ported the wordpress audio player plugin. That was essentially my last major hurdle I had to overcome in order to switch to Habari. I already have an install up and running with all my blog posts and plugins. Everything seems to be running smoothly. So, this weekend, I may be moving the blog from WordPress to Habari. If I do move, I’ll have a new feed address, so make sure you stop by the site to get the new address so you can update your feed readers.
I really hate websites that only offer a part of their post in their feed. I know why they do this. They do this so you have to visit their site in order to read the rest of the story. The more visitors they get, the more money they make. Here’s the problem though. The reason I am subscribing to your site is that I don’t find it useful enough to actually take the time to visit it. Most of the articles are a waste of my time but there are a few shining nuggets in there that made me want to subscribe. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and realize that it’s a partial post feed, I immediately unsubscribe. Why? Because I know I’ll never click on the link to continue reading the post. I don’t want to visit your site, that was the point of subscribing in the first place and making me visit it isn’t helping your cause. So for all you people out there that insist on making people visit your site just so you can generate a few extra cents of ad revenue, is it worth it? You’ll lose people like me. Who knows, I might have become a regular viewer of your website if you hadn’t driven me away by not providing the full text of a post. That’s been known to happen with me before.