In The Management's ongoing quest to maximize the satisfaction of our loyal readers, we've made a few changes around here - most notably, shifting to a new hosting service (TypePad). You'll no doubt notice a few changes (most obviously, a new template, with a different format), which I invite you to explore at your leisure.
Some of the advantages may be a bit less obvious, but I'm sure you'll learn to appreciate them as much as I will. To pick just a few improvements at random:
- I have much greater flexibility in formatting - for instance, I can insert photos within the body of a post, instead of having to make them separate posts in their own right, and put the photos wherever I want them (here's a sample, just to demonstrate)
. - I can categorize posts any way I want, and file them by topic, so if you want to look up only those posts that deal with, say, Gear Envy, you can quickly locate all the ones that deal with that subject (and just ignore all the rest of my utterly irrelevant, pointless blather that has nothing to do with whatever it is that interests you). Check out the Category list in the sidebar, and do some exploring on your own.
- I (or you, for that matter, if you have your own blog and feel so inclined) can link directly to an individual post - no doubt few, if any of you, have actually tried doing so, and thus this is probably a solution that so far has been awaiting a problem, but trust me, if any of you should start going crazy with this blog stuff, you'll appreciate the difference. If, for instance, you wanted to link to the post with Joshua's birth story - and only that post, without inflicting all the rest of my babbling on your own readers - you'd be able to do so (as I've demonstrated with the hyperlink above).
- You can also e-mail a link to just one post from the blog to your friends, if I should somehow randomly and beyond all expectation write something that you think is just hilarious or otherwise worthy of sharing (even if it's just to share a good laugh at my expense, because I didn't notice the booger hanging out of my nose in my latest picture or some other such typical David-ish thing). At the bottom of each post is a link labeled "Permalink" - click on that, and it'll load a new page with just that post on it. Copy the link into an e-mail to your sister, your best friend, or President Bush, and voila! They'll get to see whatever it was that I said that got a rise out of you. (I could really come to regret this feature.)
- You can actually subscribe to Joshua's Spot, and ask to be notified whenever there's something new. I haven't actually figured this out yet, though the "Syndicate" thing is in the sidebar, so if you want to play around with it and see if you can sort out how it works, feel free, and let me know so we can both get a clue.
- There's a built-in photo album - so we can reduce the amount of bouncing around in search of ever-better off-blog photo hosting sites that we've been doing. (Though I'll still keep the Neptune repository, since the quality is so good and it's the only way I know of to share really good, big video files, not just photos.)
There are other neat things about it - such as the calendar feature, which lets you jump right to a post on a specific date, if for some reason that appeals to you - and there are a lot of administrative features that will make my life a ton easier, which I won't bore you with. Trust me, this will be a good thing.
In the meantime, you may notice some transitional weirdness as I get this new beta site up and running. I've imported the old (Blogger) blog en masse, for instance, and I think all the posts came over - but we've lost all those comments you've made in the past, which is a real bummer in some cases and a huge relief in others. (No, I'm not telling which I put in which category! Sheesh, do I look that dumb? Don't answer that.) There may also be some weird formatting glitches in the old posts, for which I take no real responsibility, actually. And I've just taken my best wild shot at categorizing all the old posts, since there were just so darned many of them and I really didn't want to have to read through them all, all over again, in great detail, trying to figure out what I was blathering about on any given day - it was too much like, well, rereading my own writing, which is kind of, well, dull and embarrassing. So your particular favorites (ha!) may not show up where you'd otherwise expect them to be, but since I doubt you actually care in the slightest or indeed have any actual favorites to speak of, I'm sure we'll all be able to move on just fine.
Let me know what you think. If the move causes any major trauma, though, please talk to a therapist, not me. I just work here.
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