Upgrading – Please Stand By

Moving up in the world is important. Change is good, but never easy. For the past two years, we’ve run on GreyMatter, one of the first blogging tools. As much as I’ve liked the product, as solid as I thought it was, it’s also a product that is no longer supported, with no future development planned.

So, the underlying software has been changed, brought into the 21st-century. WordPress, it is. We’ll see how it runs. For the short term, though, things will look different. A lot different. The old style, it might never come back. We’ll see, though, once I’ve figured out my way through .php code. 🙂

So, stand by. Let’s see what she’s got.

(ETA-April 2007): Though the blog launched in June 2002, this is where things really started to take off. And if you ever look at the Archives you’ll see exactly what I mean–there are no lengthy gaps between posts from here on out.

Software makes the difference. GreyMatter was good to get me started, but it was very difficult to work with. WordPress was a lot easier on the backend. No rebuilding. Easier, more standardized design. I’ve never looked back.

This is where things really start.

So, what’s prior to this? Obviously, two years worth of Grey Matter posts. And some retro-content taken from a variety of sources. E-mails where I talked about my life. E-mails where I talked about Star Trek or Doctor Who. These things are fairly easy to edit into a coherent form and add them into the blog’s database. I began that, partly as an experiment, one that I’ve discovered worked out pretty well.

Now (for me), in April 2007 I’m going through the entries and adding tags. It’s a bit strange to read some of these old entries. Not because they’re three or five years in the past, but because I don’t realize sometimes quite how sardonic I can be. 😉

So this, really, is where it starts. There were growing pains still to come — upgrades, the search for the right layout — but this is the point where I got serious about creating content, because this is the point where WordPress made content easy. 🙂

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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