How to Move Your Blog and Other Tasks

Change a Blog Address
I was getting ready to move. I’d found a new place, and it was just a matter of how I’d go about moving. I’m speaking of my blog, by the way. I secured the WordPress.com URL for ‘Red House Diaries’ which was nice, because it matched the name of my blog. Now it was just a matter of packing up my stuff and moving it to my new digs. I understood there would be some glitches, depending on how I did this, but I didn’t totally understand how and what. So until the WordPress.com Happiness Engineers got back from their ‘Group Break ‘ I’d just have to wait.

UPDATE: after consulting the Happiness Engineers: If you ever want to move everything in your WordPress Blog to a new URL, do not register the new URL first. No, you have to declare you want to move, and once you have invoked the Change a Blog Address Tool, you will then choose a new URL. The new URL can not be one that has already been registered, even if you are the person who registered it.

You can export your content to a URL you already own, but that does not export your blog stats and a few other things like that. Drat. I’ll have to rethink this…

Facebook Failure
Reluctant as I am to admit it, I am a failed Facebook user. I started Facebook with some enthusiasm. I found some friends, posted pictures, told some stories, and commented on others posts. With time, however, I became increasingly disappointed in the Facebook experience.

I think this has something to do with age. Most of what I see on Facebook  is stuff I’ve heard a hundred times before. (At some point in my life, I’ve said most of the same stuff too.) Once said, the words drift off the bottom of the page, replaced by hundreds of other words, unseen or ignored by just about everyone.

Drowning in RSS Feeds
If you followed my advice to set up an RSS Feed Reader,  you may now find yourself awash in interesting things to read. Maybe too many interesting things. I decided I had to  weed my feeds. Think of it as a form of farming and gardening. Some feed readers let you round up your feeds and pen them into named folders. I started off with topic folders. Then I moved each of my feeds into one of these folders. Now, when I’ve read a feed that I like, I click the little star next to the post title.

Over the next few weeks, I can see how many stars I’ve assigned to that feed. If I don’t give a blog lots of stars, then I might have to unsubscribe from it. At least, that is the premise. We’ll see.