Public Service Announcement
Just letting readers know that over the next couple (few?) months I’ll be transitioning over from the Blogware platform to Wordpress. Tucows, the Toronto-based software company that owned Blogware, has decided to stop supporting it and is letting it die a slow death. To be fair, they’re not booting me off. I’ve been given fair warning that I need to find another host at some point, so I’m just assuming it should be sooner rather than later. I liked using Blogware, but like anything in life I’m comparing that against not using anything else. So I’m looking forward to trying out Wordpress. Change is good.
Now, I’m told the transition will be relatively smooth. I can preserve all my past posts — more than three years worth — and comments, though all past comments will unfortunately be relabelled “anonymous.” All links will be preserved, though I’m getting the sense that I may loose some of the pictures associated with past posts — no biggy. I’m sure there will be some glitches and pain during the transition, but I’ll try to make it as smooth as possible.
The most important thing you can do right now is make sure your browser’s Favorites list or your blogroll goes to www.cleanbreak.ca, rather than the Blogware URL tyler.blogware.com. The www.cleanbreak.ca address will always been the same, regardless of what platform I use.
I’m toying with the idea of changing the logo, because I’m not sure the current colours match any of the Wordpress themes. I’ll try to keep it simple. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Cheers.
P.S. — the lack of support for Blogware explains why some of you have had problems with the captchas — i.e. the blurred characters you must enter to have your comments posted. This has been frustrating for many readers here, so the move to Wordpress will eliminate this problem.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
July 25th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Well, while you are still on Blogware, in case others have a problem entering the ‘capchas’, all they have to do, if the letters are not visible, is click on the ‘Post’ button, which will bring them back to the ‘Post Comment’ page, but with the ‘capcha’ letters now visible- in fact, I had to do that to post this;-)
July 27th, 2008 at 7:26 am
Hi Tyler,
I moved our blog from Blogger over to a self hosted Word Press and do not regrett taking the time to do it.
Yes, you can export / save all your articles / comments / etc. from one to then upload into your Word Press self hosted site fairly easily.
The hard part for me, not being very computer technical, was to get my site with the visual appearance I wanted. But, once done, it works very nice.
Dan
DailyHomeRenoTips.com
August 3rd, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Tyler-
You may want to consider using Squarespace. This hosted blogging service provides significantly better tools than does Wordpress. You can try it for free for 14 days…www.squarespace.com.
Tristan
August 4th, 2008 at 9:27 am
On a not entirely unrelated topic, Tyler, when are you going to do podcasts again?
(PS- thanks to the earlier commentor who divulged the secret of the captchas–worked for me!)
August 20th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Wordpress is absolutely great! It has so many themes, some of them you can buy for a very small fee, it’s also extremely easy to tweak the colour, anybody who knows some PHP will be able to edit template for you.
On a totally different note, I couldn’t find how to contact you rather then leaving a comment. Would you consider adding a link to two new waste to energy projects in Canada? Zero Waste Vancouver and Zero Waste Ottawa to your left side bar? Thank you and good luck with moving the blog. If you need help with theme modification, email guys at aborg.com