It looks like my blog has survived the Blogger FTP shutdown and is now safely in the hands of WordPress.org. The proof is in the pudding, so grab a spoon and dig in. There may be a few additional changes, maybe even improvements. But what you see right now is pretty much what you will be getting.

All I can say is that WordPress is tough to hack around with. Blogger required a general level of familiarity with computer programming, but WordPress.org with its PHP and “themes” and “widgets” and “plug-ins” is up there on a whole ‘nuther level. It’s wonderful that so many techie kids today are willing to fiddle around and offer a wide variety of pre-packaged site designs and add-ons for free to the public. It’s one of those nice things that the Internet has brought about, another instance of “digital community building” (a virtual version of an old-fashioned barn-raising, perhaps).

But despite the thousands of themes and adjuncts available for a self-hosted WordPress site, they all represent someone else’s idea of what a blog should be. I’ve tried my best to make this MY blog, but in the end even I had to give in and use a plug-in (for the archive formatting, once I get around to “Wordpressing” that page). It’s just too hard to start from scratch on coming up with a list of past monthly archive pages sorted with year headings. You’d think that would be an obvious option in the standard WordPress functions, but it’s not; they’ll give you a straight list of all months, or all individual blog entries, or year-by-year pages, but will not do anything more.

I’ll miss Blogger, with all of its formatting flexibility. WordPress is more of a take-it-or-learn-a-new-programming-language proposition. Hopefully, my blog is a little better for the process. Nonetheless, dealing with WordPress is a bit like going through a “wine press” or being starched and “pressed” by a hot iron. If you like conformity, you’ll be fine; but if you’re like me and you don’t, then be ready for some big headaches when you enter the world of WordPress!