Welcome to my new place!

Cardboard BoxIt’s been on the cards for a while, but I’ve finally done it. I’ve moved! If you are reading this, then welcome to my blog’s new home at www.three-legged-cat.co.uk

I’ve been using self-hosted WordPress for my professional blog and it’s just so nice to use, I love it, but moving three-legged-cat.blogspot.com to a new home seemed like too much trouble, so I left it where it was and prevaricated. I’m good at that.

Enter Haloscan/JS-Kit/Echo. Things have been rumbling on over there for a while, but the bottom line is that it’s finally decision time. I haven’t had my ‘pay up or clear off’ email yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

It’s not the prospect of paying for a service that bothers me, that’s fair enough (and I did originally pay for Haloscan). The problem is that I’m simply not won over by Echo’s commenting system – I’ve tried it on a couple of sites and it’s slow and a bit lacking in user friendliness. I’ve always used Haloscan because I wanted something really simple.

I’d probably have stayed with Blogger, but unfortunately as far as I can tell, no-one has created a method for moving comments from Haloscan into Blogger.

However, I did have a Baldrick moment. I formed a cunning plan. Oh yes.

My cunning plan involved pulling all my posts across to a temporary WordPress blog and using these instructions to grab all my Haloscan comments. That bit worked like a dream.

Then all I had to do was import everything back to Blogger, via a quick bit of trickery (because Blogger doesn’t seem to want to talk to the other blog platforms) and all would be well. Except it wasn’t. That bit did not work. Not at all.

So I found myself with a perfectly functioning WordPress blog, with all my comments. I also had a perfectly functioning Blogger blog, soon to be without all my comments (unless I sign up for Echo, or Disqus). Should I give up on the comments and stay with Blogger? No, I think that was the push I needed to go it alone.

So I’ve moved. Thank you for following me – hope you like the new place.

Photo: Cardboard Box by ahhyeah. Used under Creative Commons Licence.

7 comments to Welcome to my new place!

  • Am I the first?

    Welcome to your new home!

    And congratulations on the successful move.

  • Lois Lindemann

    Thank you- you certainly are the first!

  • I love it. It looks great and has a great feel to it. I was talking with a friend in sweden who has been considering writing a blog and asked me what the best platform was and wordpress was it. So this is a good move.

  • Z

    It looks lovely. Will it have a RSS feed before long?

    • three-legged-cat

      Thank you! It already had a feed, but when I read your comment I checked it and discovered the links weren’t working. Hopefully that’s now fixed. *crosses fingers* The feed is at: http://three-legged-cat.co.uk/feed/

      However, if I’ve got it right, anyone subscribed to a feed from my old blog should now be getting posts from the new one, thanks to the wonders of Feedburner.

      To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing with Feedburner, so I ended up subscribing to my old blog to check that I’d got the settings right. Amazingly, it has worked – I started receiving the posts from the new feed here on the old subscription, so hopefully the feed redirect will work for everyone.

  • Blummin’ heck, I’m confused. I’ve been coming here for a couple of days now (three all told) and seen the same post at the top (this one). Thinking that *regular service* had been resumed, I never scrolled down to see any new posts. I’m a fool!

    Anyhoo, I’m up to speed now. I know where you are, I know where you are writing (under this), and I know how to two-finger-scroll (as we macpeople do). Carry on!

    • Lois Lindemann

      Sorry Will. I’ve unstuck this post now. šŸ™‚

      Mind you, the fact that I’ve been writing new posts is quite surprising given my recent performance.