Back up and running (sort of)

A week ago, I mentioned that I was changing web hosts and strange things might happen to the appearance of this blog. Today marks my safe arrival back after making the transfer.

When I initiated the process last week, I planned to simply install WordPress and import all of my old content. I’ve been blogging since the end of 2007, and I’ve churned out quite the ocean of words here.

But over the last week I found myself developing a different plan. Instead of importing all of my old posts, I’m going to import some of them — the book reviews and some of the other more thoughtful posts — over a period of time, mainly by cutting and pasting.

Basically, I’m starting with a clean slate, for several reasons. One is that I’d like to organize things differently. This started as a personal blog and evolved into a book blog, but I’d kind of like to get back to writing a bit less frequently and a bit more deeply. I wrote here not long ago about the compulsion to write reviews of everything I read, and to read as quickly as possible. I’d rather find my more natural pace again as a reader and thinker, and pause more often to think (in writing) about what I’m reading — and how it connects to my life.

Another irritation has been technical. My blog crashed three times while being hosted at my old server. Once they moved my database without warning and had to restore the data. Two other times, I tried to upgrade my version of WordPress and the blog crashed. I discovered that the hosting service didn’t meet the minimal requirements for WP. I think they did when I first opened my account, but as WP evolved the hosting service didn’t keep up. It wasn’t what they call a “rich hosting environment” for WP. So there were various technical glitches and oddities about how my blog functioned even before the crashes; after each respective crash it got weirder.

(By the way, Gentle Reader, don’t let this happen to you. If you want to start a self-hosted blog, pick a really good hosting service. The one I’ve switched to is a night-and-day different experience!)

One other technical irritation was that some of the plugins here were linked to my old WP.com blog. I didn’t want to continue being tied to it.

There is an appeal to starting over instead of investing more time in trying to upload old files. In the past they’ve never been complete and have resulted in many headaches. I don’t have the time or energy for it.

So… I still want to bring back many of my previous posts, but I’m just going to reproduce them from my backups one at a time. I do like having all of my book reviews in one place. So don’t be surprised at seeing a lot of familiar posts over the next few… weeks? months? Dunno, and I’m not going to stress about it.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I realize that no one is losing sleep over my blogging practices, but I do respect my readers and wanted to provide some explanation for what’s going on here. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments or in an email to janet AT acrossthepage.net.