I’ve moved my blog to WP Engine, partially it is more convenient for my work at Wordnik (I can install our “Related Content” plugin, which I couldn’t do at WordPress.com).

If you are subscribed to my RSS feed, you’ll want to change it to http://willwhim.wpengine.com/feed/l

Sorry for the radio silence; I’ve been busy working on The Trumpet in my spare time.

Microsoft enters the mid oughties, and provides blog posting directly from Microsoft Word. Will it work, or no?

Actually, this is pretty cool. It seems to allow me to edit the current blog post, and even to assign categories. My cynicism is unbecoming.

But can I put in a table?

And what about images?

This is Hal and me at the Golden Gate Sacred Harp Convention last month. Hal is singing. I’m just grinning.

I got tired of baking my own bread, or better, perhaps, emptying my own garbage, so I’ve moved my weblog to WordPress.com (where you are right now). Please update your links, RSS feeds, etc.

Here’s how to move a self-hosted WordPress weblog to WordPress.com, by exporting to XML and reimporting at WordPress.com. Depending on the version of WordPress software you are running, these instructions might have to be adjusted. Just look around: the right button or link is somewhere to be found.

1. Go to WordPress.com and sign up for a weblog, or create a new one if you already have one there.
2. Go to the Administration Panel of your current weblog. Delete all of your spam comments. If you have had your weblog for a while, you might have a lot. Go to “Comments”  (not “My Comments”), Look for the “Spam” link. If you’re comfortable deleting all the comments marked as spam, Press the “Delete all Spam” link.
3. Go to the Adminstration Panel of your current weblog, and export your weblog. Go to “Tools/Export”. You might need to set an author. Press the “Download Export File” button. This will save a file called “wordpress-something-mumble.xml” or something like that to your local machine.
4. Go to WordPress.com Administration Panel and import the data. Note: this doesn’t import images, just “your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.”
5. Explore setting themes, etc., creating an about page, etc.
6. Put a weblog post at your old weblog pointing to your new weblog. There’s magjick that you can incant to make some things redirect automatically, but this seems like a reasonable thing to do.

It’s pretty easy to do, really; but, for some reason, I haven’t seen a very good write-up. I hope this is helpful. If it is, let me know! If not, or you have corrections, let me know, too.

Some of proclaimed the “end of blogging,” and it’s certainly the case that I haven’t written as much for this weblog recently. I do a lot of the teaching at our church, and more recently have been trying to write out my teaching notes and to send them to people who are interested or just unable to attend on a given Sunday. It’s a lot easier to do a teaching from an outline than to write everything down so that it’s semi-coherent, and that takes a significant amount of time. We’re trying to be more deliberate about posting these teachings on the church website as well as on Facebook. And that, too takes time.

And about Facebook and Twitter. The 140 character limit of a Twitter ‘tweet’ is just right for a lot of the statusey things I write, and often attracts comments (both on Facebook and in person) that posting on the weblog doesn’t. For example, yesterday I twitted: “Thanks to Brad & Karen Bahler & others, I got to sing “Hoboken style” with the David & Johnny Lee in Indiana yesterday.”, and got two comments, one from a friend in Canada (“What exactly is Hoboken style”) and one from California, “Oooo… you lucky dog!” And, writing code takes a lot of time and effort.

So, I find myself writing either much longer things than I typically blog about as church teaching, or much shorter, conversational tweets on Facebook and Twitter. But I like the blog format, and am somewhat inspired to be more deliberative about it. A weblog post about blogging doesn’t really count, though.

I’d better go off and think of something to say.

I updated WordPress, my blogging software, today. Let me know if there is any problem.

Your blog might be in trouble if you update your blog theme more often than the content.

I have no time to create my own, but I hope this is easier to read than the last. Three columns are a bit much, though. And for some reason I wasn’t getting updates about comments, but I seem to be doing so now.

Let me know what you think (esp if you’re Michael Hanneman).

Accidentally nuked my WordPress theme; here’s a new one.