As you may or may not have noticed I have switched URLs for this blog. I did this, as I mentioned in an earlier post, in preparation for Google eventually turning off FTP support on blogger.

I actually have other blogs on another domain name. Well the one main blogs then some other sites in the form of blogger blogs as sub-domains. Anyway I re-purposed the root of that other domain for the new site around the HTA project I'm cooking up. And since blogger isn't an option I installed WordPress.

This is actually the first time I have installed WP on a live-to-the-world sort of web server. I did install it before on my laptop using some portable web server package called XAMPP. 

Anyway the installation went incredibly smoothly. The only hiccup was in the address of the SQL server but that turned out to have been caused by an extra space before the address in the config file. Once the space was deleted there weren't any more bumps. And now that I start to play with the thing it is just an incredible piece of content management technology. I can hardly believe I have stayed on the incredibly overly-simplistic non-powerful blogger for so long when this clearly superior CMS was out there just waiting for me!

In fairness I did have to know how to create a SQL database along with an associated user for database in order to fill out the config file. Other than that it was just incredibly simple. For instance to add a list of links to the side bar I can create collections of links with a simple form, assigning each link a category name. Then just drag-and-drop a links "widget" to the side bar area in the widgets portion of the admin interface, click save and...magically it's just kind of there. I don't have to know or care how it happened or anything else. I refresh the page and bam! updated links. Just incredible. Actually blogger doesn't even do that as far as I know so in that way I think WP is actually easier than blogger.

Needless to say I am quite happy with WP. Eventually I will install WP on this blog's URL as well and then try and figure out if it's possible to switch over all the content of this blog to that domain, managed with WP. I don't know when I will do this but probably soon consdiering how easy it is. I did leave a "I've changed addresses" type of post at the old address but apparently I should have proof-read it because it hardly even makes sense what I wrote. Fortunately no one is actually reading so I don't really have to worry about it!

Actually I also used the "export" feature of blogger to export all of my blogs, in the form of XML files apparently, as well as converting them over to free blogger-hosted blogs as well. I only discovered this as an option after I had begun copying over all the files from my FTP space to my local PC. Actually in a sub-folder of my drop box folder so really my several sites are backed up on a bunch of different PCs as well as "the cloud".

The only downside of switching to the free blogger addresses was the lack of migration of all my images. Most of the sites that wasn't an issue but at least a couple of them relied heavily on screenshots and now presumably make very little sense sans-screenshot images.

I did actually do other stuff besides messing with my blogs and WP. Namely for I think the third day running I spent a large portion of the day with my niece-the-toddler. I think she's somewhere between liking me as an uncle and tolerating my presence in the absence of no one else. Or maybe I'm making too much of the limited communication skills of a two-year-old.

To put it mildly I know a lot more of a show called Caillou then I ever wanted to know. My niece apparently can't get too much of it. I can get too much of it. But she can't. It's kind of bizarre on some level. But I don't know I guess I can see how it could be entertaining to a toddler. Actually that raises a point sort of: my niece is completely accustomed to on-demand-Caillou whenever she wants. So when she's some place that doesn't have on-demand cable she isn't happy. Will this kind of instant gratification have any lasting effects on her long term personality...? There's no commercials in her universe either. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't think she'll be able to avoid having to deal with that at some point. But being trained to expect instant gratification? I'm not sure if that's such a good thing.