The site is back online. The datacenter of my provider had to deal with a power outage today, which caused considerable downtime. Thankfully everything is back up and running.

And I’m back from holidays. We had a great time in the south of Spain, and it was a very relaxing time. Sunny and warm weather, great Andalusian food and some nice red wine are excellent great ingredients to accomplish this. Add some great conversations, a little exercise (I had never heard of Padel Tennis before) and two satisfied children and it all sums up to a holiday to remember.

Happy children are essential

This was the first time that we really had a holiday with small children. We had a holiday with good friends of ours, and we both have babies. Jesse (our son) is nine months old now, and thankfully he enjoyed himself very much and the same goes for the little girl of our friends. I think I’m only beginning to understand how much of a critical success factor those little ones are. If they don’t feel okay … well euhm that would put everything under a lot of pressure I guess.

Getting back into the groove again

The last couple of days I’ve been clinging on to the feeling of holidays, but it’s time to get back into the groove. And the blog’s been swinging the past two weeks! Visitor numbers skyrocketed this month (over 20k visitors already), as my post with the 21 riddles got a lot of attention from StumbleUpon. The comment count is now greater than the post count (silly observation actually, but I like it )

Inboxes, projects and next actions

Holidays have given me the insight that I’m not done with simplifying. Not by a long shot! One evening I was contemplating everything that was not finished at home and that required my attention. It’s simply too much! I decided that I have to take two measures:

• Simplify: Eliminate unnecessary stuff
• Finish up: Finally (!) finish my almost finished projects

So I’ll be giving attention to those topics some more, and on my challenge to become an early bird of course.

Aah…it was great to be on holidays, but it’s also great to be back!

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be offline for two weeks. I’m putting some of my recent posts in action, as I’m going on vacation (a habit 7 activity from the 2nd quadrant) and I’ll enjoy the airports along the way.

You already know that I didn’t manage to write a lot of posts for these two weeks, but a handful of short ones will come out along the way. If you don’t want to miss any updates, I suggest you subscribe to the free e-mail updates or to the RSS feed of my blog.

Now…Andalusia here we come.

Well everything is back online. It was quite a lot of work, but I’m quite satisfied with the results. Well, I still have work to do, as I have to apologize to the (minority) of Internet Explorer users among the readers, as the layout goes haywire there. I think it has to do with the way margins and padding are handled by different browsers, but I have to dig into it. Luckily most of my visitors use Firefox (over 75% actually).

Short recap
I won’t bore you too much with writing about all the work I did, but here’s a little recap:

• I expected Feedburner to be an easy transition, but it wasn’t. Somehow they didn’t recognize my subdomain as a valid address. A slightly different notation made all the difference, and my feed is running again.
• Updating the DNS settings was easy. My host Argeweb, offers a nice interface to do this, and it worked like a charm. Now only to wait for all the DNS-servers to update and all the cache to clear around the world so everybody will get the new site.
• Permalink fixing was not that bad. There where different options to solve this issue, but I chose to make the new permalinks for existing posts, identical to the one they had on typepad. No hassle with redirects, and the .htaccess file. I did have to dig into the MySQL database, but this post at Slacker Manager provided a great description of how to take care of it. Only some minor manual changes had to be done after that part.
• Most of the work was in getting the layout of the posts right. Exporting from Typepad was easy, importing in Wordpress as well, only the layout got messed up in some posts. While at it, I fixed the links to the images, and cleaned up a lot of html code (note to self: Never use copy-paste text from Word or Google Docs again…ever!).

Stuff to be done
In short a list of things I still want to do, mainly technical:

• Fix layout for Internet Explorer
• Check layout in Opera and Safari
• Put my About page online
• Checking the wfw:comments tag in my feed so Feedflare can display a count
• Change the picture above (this is the picture from the original YGo Loner theme)

Final thoughts
So this is the first post I created in Wordpress in its entirety. Up until now I like it! Don’t get me wrong, I liked Typepad as well. I think they offer a great service, that made it very easy for me to start a blog and post content. I ended up using it for only 3 months. In these months my enthusiasm for blogging and for the technology behind it grew, and Typepad was too limiting or too expensive to give me the same options as Wordpress is giving me. But it was great to start with.

Preparing and changing the blog was great, but I’m glad that from here on I can spend more time creating content.

PS: If you experience any glitches, please leave me a comment or mail me at lodewijkvdb (at) lodewijkvdb (dot) com. Screenshots are welcome and please specify your browser. Thanks!

The last two weeks I haven’t come around to writing a lot, as I’ve been preparing to move to a self-hosted Wordpress solution for my blog. I’ve learned a lot about CSS, PHP as I’ve been modifying the code and the design for the blog.

This weekend I will move the blog. I don’t expect it to be a glitchfree transfer, so I thought I’d best give an advance notification.

Some of the challenges:

• Transferring Feedburner to the new feed (this should go pretty smoothly)
• Changing the CNAME record in the DNS of my current host
• Adjusting the permalink-structure for the typepad-posts, I don’t want to break any links to my blog

The address will stay the same (blog.lodewijkvdb.com). If you experience errors, you can visit lodewijkvdb.typepad.com, please leave a comment. I’ll be checking Typepad in the meantime, and I get my comments mailed to me.

I’ve prepared it pretty decent, but I do expect some troubles. There’s always troubles. See you on the other side!