A New Year, A New Home for Provocations and Pantings

For the past twelve months, I have contemplated numerous times leaving Blogger but either didn't have the time or the fortitude to follow through with it. I have enjoyed Blogger and the services it provides, but I feel that it is time to move on. For the next three or four days, I will be preparing the new site for Provocations and Pantings. This blog will still exist, but I must mention that the formatting has seriously been affected in a recently failed attempt at backing up my blogposts. Needless to say, it was a disaster and proved to be a final motivation for trying something else. The new blog will have approximately 60% of the posts from the archives, hoping to keep the more important and relevant posts for cataloging and tagging. The first post on the new blog will be on January 1, 2007. By the end of next week, I hope to have all the posts on the new blog filed and cataloged. One of the problems I am facing is the loss of all images, YouTube videos, and minor formatting issues upon importing my old posts. I also have a very basic template at this moment as I am still trying to learn my options and create an aesthetically pleasing yet fully functional blog. For those wondering, there are several things that prompted my departure from Blogger: 1. There are several formatting issues with Blogger when going between IE, Firefox, and other browsers where margins, fonts, and graphics are inconsistent at best and nonexistent at worst. 2. When I changed the comment policy to not allow anonymous comments, the only people who could comment were those who obtained a Blogger account (a relatively small number of blog readers). Consequently, significant conversation and discussion was relegated to a privileged few rather than everyone. With the new blog, all you will have to have is an email address to comment, making it available to virtually everyone. 3. Several times throughout the year, Blogger went down for maintenance, sometimes for days. Given the nature of blogging and timeliness of its medium, an unreliable server can defeat the purpose or at least minimalize the effectiveness of blogging. 4. There are several widgets I prefer to have such as having the ability to catalog and file posts, view archives in various ways, manage posts, and customize domains. 5. Finally, I simply think that there are other blog providers who offer more powerful tools which are easily accessible to accomplish what I am looking to do in the future. As I learn more about how to write and use the medium of blogging to facilitate a platform for the presentation of my thoughts and convictions, I will continue to search for ways to communicate unchanging truth in our transient times. With that said, I recollect on my first days with Blogger when I did not know how to hyperlink or post a picture. While I cannot say that I am a veteran blogger, I can at least pretend like I am now, thanks to Blogger. So signing off Blogger with two years and 875 posts full of learning and reflecting, Timmy Brister