About the image:  Garden of the Gods. I think this formation looks like a giant campfire. As with many of the other formations there, I don’t know it’s official name. I do wish I’d included something for scale. The “campfire” is large enough for people to hide in the spaces between the flames, there were two adults in there when I photographed, but it isn’t as large as some in the park.

Consumed with blogging changes, web hosting changes, and all the work involved in making those changes, I am questioning my sanity or, at least, questioning my commitment to the blogging improvement project I’ve begun.

I wanted the ability to post date my posts so that I could write before traveling and have the posts appear on the blog while I’m away. I also wanted static pages, not a link to one of my posts, but true static pages.

I switched from Blogger to WordPress.com, found a template that would work well with my material and imported my old blog posts from blogger to wordpress. I had to move the link list separately. A little time consuming, but not hard.

I know I’ll have to eventually upload the photos that go with the 50+ posts I made on the original Blogger site if I remove that site on Blogger since the photo files aren’t imported with the blog posts. The photos are still in googleland somewhere and the new site just gets them from there.

I also wanted the word “wordpress” (or blogspot) out of my url. I could have pointed one of my urls to the blog on blogger or wordpress to achieve this, but I’d been reading about the satisfaction of users who installed wordpress blogging software from wordpress.org in their web hosting accounts.

I decided to upgrade my web hosting package to increase space and get the requirements that support wordpress blogs and in the process decided to change hosts.

The change in hosting meant spending time setting it all up, e-mails, passwords, downloading a new ftp client, uploading my photography website, and installing wordpress to a directory in my new site.

I used Fantastico, available on the new hosting account, to install wordpress. After the install, I played with the wordpress software and discovered using it to be very much like the wordpress.com experience.

I imported new my wordpress.com blog to my newer hosting site by making an export file and then importing the posts my new blog site. I created an opml url for my links with a tool on another site to import the link list (my blogroll).

I confidently began downloading themes to try. This involves searching for themes, downloading the zipped files, unzipping the files and uploading them via FTP to the proper location in my site.

I had an evening of fun trying out themes, but many of them distort my imported posts and will have to be customized to be usefull. But hey, that’s what using wordpress is all about, yeah? Having it your way.

Then I see I was too hurried and have a problem. The fantastico installed the version of wordpress prior to the most recent update. Reading about the upgrade, I find it’s needed to fix a security problem. We all want security, yes?

I upgrade by first creating a backup file and then removing most of the many wordpress files from my site and uploading the upgrade files (download the upgrade, unzip, upload the upgrade files to specific locations in the remaining wordpress files).

After a few days of stumbling around figuring out what I wanted from my blog and how to get it, I can now be happy, right?

Well, somewhat happy.

I will need to customize a theme, not too hard if I want to spend some time learning how to do it. I know some html and css, the php and rss and other things I need to know are new to me.

And, there is still the old daily photography website to update and oh(!)wouldn’t it be nice now to have an integrated look with website and the blog so that the two, website and blog, can be as one?

I’m wondering how much a web designer would charge to finish this project! I want to spend the rest of today taking photographs.