Welcome Back

If you're reading this it means that our technical difficulties have been resolved and you have landed back at our old blogging platform (Blogger). Hooray! You should notice that things are snappy again and some things should be familiar from before the original switch to theeibls. Whitney and I should be able to resume normal blogging now with greater productivity and reduced stress.

If anyone is interested in the details of what happened, when we were going to switch the blog over to theeibls.com, I already had a web hosting plan with it for the old wedding website, so I thought it would be fun to move the blog over to be self-hosted rather than point the domain at Blogger. I liked the idea of having more control over the site rather than having Google running everything behind the scenes. Because Blogger is not available for self-hosting, I decided to use WordPress, which at the time I figured was pretty much the same feature-wise and it wouldn't be a big deal to switch.

That was my big downfall; we had several problems with WordPress, and the only thing I used my extra self-hosting powers for was to hack up the php to try to fix things that just worked in Blogger. WordPress is slow, and seems like it can only be made workable with a combination of fast (aka pricey) hosting and a kludge of third-party speedup solutions. That kind of headache is just not worth it for a blog with a handful of readers. The other major problem with WordPress is that the post editor is terrible; the visual (WYSIWIG) editor frequently inserts weird formatting that you do not ask for, and doesn't permit certain formatting techniques that are easy in Blogger. On top of that, the html-style editor is not actually html, making it very difficult to fix the things that the visual editor screwed up, whereas Blogger gives you the real html.

All of that made it worthwhile to go back and port a few months of posts back to Blogger and to apply some of the stylistic updates we had made to the WordPress site (before the move I hadn't realized how flexible the Blogger templating is). Hopefully you appreciate the move as much as we do!