The Old Betchablog

OK, I actually did it. If you read the previous post, you’ll know that I was thinking of moving this blog to a self-hosted server and doing a bit of a blog makeover in the process. I asked for some feedback via the survey… thank you very much to everyone who kindly responded. The results were interesting.

Some of you were ok with the site the way it is (and you’re right I think. It’s not *terrible*, though I thought it could be improved) Most of you didn’t reallt hate the current design, but a majority agreed that it could use an update, or at least thought that a change would be as good as a holiday. Quite a few of you didn’t really care one way or the other, since you only ever view the site in an RSS reader anyway.

There were a lot of positive comments about the quality of the content (Thank you!) but there was a general consensus that the sidebars were a little too cluttered and messy. I think I agree with you. The current blog just sort of evolved over time and had a lot going on in the sidebars that was not all that relevant to you. (although tracking visitors and the like is interesting to me, I can see that it’s not all that important to you)   I agree that the most important thing is (or at least should be) the content, and that the easier I can make it to get to it, find what you’re looking for, and read it, the better.

So I’ve moved to a new blog.  You can find it at www.chrisbetcher.com, although most of the old addresses, such as www.betchablog.com or www.betchaboy.com will redirect to it. (All except the actual Edublogs URL obviously) The export and import worked ok for the most part, although there are few oddities with fonts in places, and there may be missing images from some of the very old posts. Que Sera.  I’ve redone all the RSS feeds so things should work as usual in your feed readers without you needing to change anything.  Rather than start again, I managed to shift over the existing site stats, Google analytics and so on to the new site – something that I did for the technical geekery of finding out how to do it moreso than because I actually needed them carried over.

The new site is a bit plain at the moment, but I want to keep it fairly simple.  I gave a sneak peek to some of my Twitter folk to do a bit of usability testing and the response so far was positive.  Thanks to everyone who offered some feedback and to test it for me.  I still need to design a graphic header, maybe tweak the CSS to adjust some of the colours, etc, but I think it will be worth it for the additional stuff I can do with WordPress plugins.  There are some amazing plugins out there, but not all of them work with WPMU and I can understand why the Edublogs team have to be a little conservative about which ones they allow… a rogue plugin can bring down a WordPress server, and when you have the sorts of uptime pressures that Edublogs must have, it makes sense to err on the side of caution.  In my own sandpit, I don’t have to play it as safe so I can try using some neat WordPress tools that I wouldn’t normally have access to.

Thanks again to everyone who reads and engages with Betchablog.  I hope you make the move with me over to the new site, and I look forward to lots more blogging in the future.

And a special thank you to the team at Edublogs for everything you’ve provide to not just me, but to the entire edublogging community over the years.  It’s a great service and I would never have gotten to this point without you.

See you all on the other side…

Image: ‘We’re Not Gone‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035597898@N01/405395160