Administrative notes

So it’s been almost a week, and I am getting comfy in my new bloggy home. There are still boxes of clutter everywhere and I’m still tinkering with where I want to keep the blogroll and whether I like the sofa under that window and whether I should plaster all my categories on the wall beside the Green Day poster or tuck them away in a dropdown box. But in general, it’s starting to feel like home.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how the look of a blog and the voice of the blogger are so intertwined? Or is that just me? It took me weeks to get used to seeing my words in a new font last time I changed it back on the old site, so I think it’s going to take a while for me to get used to all this happy yellow and fanciness. (No joke, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I fixed the columns so they were left-justified instead of centred yesterday.) Do you think the new look suits the overall character of the blog?

I’m pretty happy with WordPress over Blogger, and will likely write a couple of posts detailing exactly why and how I went about the transition (should anybody care) and maybe writing up a comparison of Blogger-hosted versus WordPress on my domain. The short version is, I’m glad I made the switch.

I know I shouldn’t give much credence to the stats, but it’s still a little humbling to go from a Technorati rank of 35,790 all the way down to 3,915,745, and to watch the traffic stats fall by almost half because of a non-existant Google Page Rank over here. (Ooo, as of today, Technorati acknowledges a second blog linking to me, so my rank jumped half a million blogs to 2,469,418… how exciting! But, if I can see that at least half a dozen of you have already adjusted your links to point to the new blog, why doesn’t Technorati see that? Step away from the stats, DaniGirl.)

Speaking of which, if you’ve honoured me with a link from your blog could I please trouble you to adjust it to point to http://danigirl.ca/blog instead of the old blogspot address? If you want to pick up the new feed, it’s at http://danigirl.ca/blog/feed/.

I’m actually surprised at how quickly Google indexed the new blog. If you Google “Postcards from the Mothership“, the new site is already the fourth link on the page – so feel free to click on it to boost it up the page for me!

And by the way, does anybody have any idea how to get the hypen off the end of the blog name on Google and Technorati? It’s obviously reading something from the meta data, but I’ve played with all the options and have no idea where it came from or how to get rid of it! Anybody know from meta data and tags? Anyone?

(Edited to add: hyphen problem fixed! Yay! And an interesting factoid for anyone else interested in Technorati rank: did you know that only links that are hard-coded into the blog are counted by Technorati? Blogrolls that are maintained by a script – i.e. through Blogrolling.com – are not counted. Interesting!)

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