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Time for a Facelift

Time for a Facelift

Apparently, I didn’t think getting ready for Christmas, scheduling a blog tour for Different Dream Parenting, doing a half-dozen author radio interviews, and helping the kids move to Wisconsin was enough to keep me busy this month. Otherwise, why would I schedule two major facelifts in December.

No, no, not cosmetic surgery.
A refinishing project.
And revamping this website.
The kind of facelifts I was sure would be quick and painless.
Hah!

My husband thought refinishing Mom’s old red and white stool was craziness. “Don’t ask me to help you with it,” was his response when I dragged it onto the porch. But when all by myself, I found someone who would sandblast and prime it for $20 bucks, he relented. Pretty soon, he was removing screws and demonstrating the finer points of spray painting and sanding. Near the end of the project which took much longer than I expected, when it was evident the stool was going to be bright and cheerful in it’s new life as a plant stand, he even said, “It’s kind of fun doing a project like this together.”

No, no, revamping this website was not very fun.
Even with the nicest tech guy in the world doing the tricky stuff.
Even though I hoped he could take care of the WordPress part while I ate bon bons.
But instead I needed to learn to do it, following “simple website tutorials.”
Hah!

On the back end of the revamp, my personal opinion is that the words “simple” and “website” should never appear next to each other in a sentence. Or in the same sentence. Or paragraph. Or tutorial. Also, one of those two words should be banned from the internet.

Even though I’m still working through some emotional issues related to revamping, the website is up and running. It may take a month or so to work out some snafus. For example, to have daily posts delivered to your website, you’ll need to sign up for the RSS feed on the home page (near the top, on the right) as the old feed and the old site no longer exist. And you’ll need to get used to typing the new, short and simple address – jolenephilo.com – in your URL bar. Hopefully, the revamped site will be so much easier to load, read, navigate, search, and make comments that you won’t mind those minor, one time inconveniences.

No, no, this is not a sales pitch.
You pay no money, and you comments are appreciated.
I’ll even reply to them, which often was prevented on the old site due to tech glitches.
And because of my tendency to overschedule, which won’t happen in January.
Hah!

Change in BlogLand

Change in BlogLand

Shhh…don’t tell the iWeb people at Apple about the WordPress graphic on this blog page. Let’s keep the upcoming switch from iWeb to WordPress here at Down the Gravel Road between ourselves. The switch should make this site much faster for readers, which is a very good thing.

And the new bells and whistles it’ll offer are nice, too.

My favorite techno-buddy, Ray, has all the incomprehensible-to-my-small-brain details lined up and ready to go. He’s waiting for me to get done transferring blog posts from this blog to the new one under construction. We thought we’d figured out how to do it in one fell swoop.

But no.

So I’m transferring four years worth of posts one by one. The bugs have been worked out (through painful experience), and each transfer goes fairly quickly. But there are a lot of posts, so the whole process is taking a lot of time.

A lot of time.

But, I’m using the hours and hours and hours required for this mind-numbing process to watch DVDs of TV shows on my always-wanted-to-watch-but-can’t-justify-allocating-time-to-them category.

Shows like West Wing.
And Parenthood.
And a BBC series called Monarch of the Glen.
And – hold your breath –
Glee.

Yes, Glee. The show I swore off as a protest against their Madonna-as-role-model-for-young-women episode in the first season. To be honest, the rest of the series was better than I expected. Even though I still have issues with many of the values it promotes.

But wait.

This post is about the blog transfer, not about the TV shows that have made the transfer tolerable. So here’s the scoop: The last of the posts should be moved to the WordPress site by tonight. After that, all that remains are choosing the SEO phrases so search engines will find the blog, and building a few other pages. Once everything is ready to go, the switch will be announced on this blog and Ray will make the switch. Which we’re praying will go off without a hitch.

Wishful thinking, perhaps.

So to be on the safe side, I’m checking the latest Parenthood, Monarch of the Glen, West Wing, and Glee DVDS from the library. Because my web tech issues will pale compared to those of the Bravermans, the laird of the estate, President Martin Sheen, and the glee club nerds.

I call it WordPress de-stress.
Ahhh.