I’ve been “blogging” since early 2000 (though I had an online diary of sorts since 1998) when I modified a guestbook script to let me make quick little posts throughout the day. It was much like Twitter, being mini journal entries, but I had little mood icons and photos in each post. When LiveJournal was starting up, I decided to join because of the commenting feature. I was user 2111 to join. I imported all my mini-blogs and went from there. At some point (maybe 2003?) I decided to code my own journal. I started from a simple diary script online and learned a lot about php and mysql while making the script my own. Over the years I added a lot to the script… Cute smilies, polls, a captcha for spam comments. I also continued to keep my LiveJournal updated by posting in both places every time.

Fast forward through 9 years of blogging! I’d begun weighing the pros and cons of changing to WordPress:

Pros:

• Finally getting to post via my cell phone!
• Having my posts automatically copied to LiveJournal
• More features, more secure, more frequent updates to the interface
• Easy posting interface that should inspire me to post more often

Cons:

• 9 years of blogging to import!
• Loosing some of my custom features and being unfamiliar with the code
• Did I mention I had 9 years of posts to import??

Well, the pros won, and Danny kindly updated the install I did so that he could use the new LJ import system to get everything into my shiny, new WordPress. It took no time to get the default template looking like my old blog. I’ve had to edit WP for work, so I am getting familiar with the templates and css they use. I have 3,000+ entries to tag and categorize, but I can pick away at that.

Not related, but my cell phone is cute!

The very first thing I did after the entries were imported was delete all the Twitter daily digests. I’d been having them posted to LiveJournal so there were be entries there and people wouldn’t think I’d died. I realize that that is something of a journal faux pas nowadays – I certainly wouldn’t have had them posted to my real journal. So they are gone, and I’ve deactivated them for good. I’m hoping that having a new blog to play with keeps me posting.

I did set my LiveJournal to send commentors to my site to comment. This is something I’d done for a while by hand until I got tired of having to type in links since nothing was automated. I realize this may keep some people from commenting, but that is fine for the time being. I’ve never felt a drive to get as many comments/visitors/hits as possible. It’s always really nice when I *do* get a lot, but there are more important things in the world!

So, what do you think of my new “home”? I’m sure I have a ton of “rearranging” to do still – I’ve only just begun.