You can lay the blame for my blog on pdb; he inspired me to start and now refers to me, slightly creepily, as his “blog spawn.” I figured, quite reasonably, that if he can do it…
I first set up shop on Blogger, which is owned by Google. It worked well enough, but it wasn’t quite as flexible as I would have liked. After incessant pestering, I took the plunge and “upgraded” to the Blogger beta, which gained me absolutely nothing and forced me to be signed in to a Google account to post or comment. This pissed me off, especially since I had a different Google account that I used for email. I could be in my Gmail account, or on Blogger, but not both at the same time. Suffice it to say I was not in love with Blogger.
Also, around the same time that I started blogging, I went through a very lengthy interview process with Google. After almost two months, they declined to make me an offer. I did not take this personally; I’d done my homework and knew that what I’d experienced was par for the course. They tend to put folks through a gauntlet of tests and a huge number of interviews, then drop them without a word of explanation. Like I said, I knew that would probably happen to me, and I was right. The whole process gave me a little peek inside the company, though, and… Well, the place struck me as being vaguely cultish and more than a little creepy. I’m not at all sure that I would have taken the job if it had been offered.
Between that experience and the AOL search data scandal, I got a little wary of having so much of my online life and personal information in the hands of Google. Between that unease and my growing dissatisfaction with the Blogger service, plus my ownership of a perfectly good domain name, plotting my next move didn’t require a Ph.D. in rocket surgery. I signed up for web hosting.
So far (and I’m less than a week into this), everything has been great. Migrating the blog from Blogger to my own WordPress installation took a bit of research and savvy, but the end result made it worthwhile. I now have complete control over my layout, I got rid of that stupid navigation bar, and the page looks (at least in my eyes) better than ever. While it’s pure vanity, I also get a little kick out of having my own domain and a bunch of @unforgivingminute.com email addresses. Check out that slick entry page, too. Yeah, I know: Get over yourself, kid.
I won’t go through all the nitty-gritty details of getting a domain, securing a host, and setting up a site. There’s plenty of tutorials already out there. If you’re interested in the details of my own experience or are thinking about taking the plunge yourself, by all means leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll be glad to help you out. For me, the whole thing was pretty simple and straightfoward. I’m a reasonably savvy amateur geek, not a professional IT nerd, and I was able to do what needed doing without breaking anything or begging for help from more knowledgeable folks.
Updates will follow as the situation warrants…
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