I ended up moving more quickly than I had intended. But as of today, this is the new permanent home of Media Nation. After four years on Blogger.com, I decided I wanted a better-looking blog with the greater functionality offered by WordPress. Over time, I plan to consolidate my various other Web presences here.
Thank you to everyone for your comments and advice on the new look and feel. I agree with those who say the photo — taken in the booth at WBZ-TV (Channel 4) while political analyst Jon Keller was interviewing U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch — is distracting. No offense to Keller and Lynch; the fault is entirely the photographer’s. At some point I will come up with a better image.
Please adjust your bookmarks and your RSS subscriptions.
Many thanks to my former student John Guilfoil, the founder and editor of Blast Magazine, who helped me with the set-up process and is now assisting with tweaks to the design.
Tweaking away: What I know about CSS would not fill a tiny thimble. But I’ve managed to boost the body-type size by 5 percent and improve the contrast a bit.
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George Williams
I really like the look of the new site.
Doug Shugarts
Congrats, Dan. The site looks terrific!
Flan
Looks good, very clean.
Doug Shugarts
One quick question — you do plan to keep the Blogger site available for archive searches, etc?
Dan Kennedy
Doug: Every Media Nation post and comment is already at the new site. My consultant, John Guilfoil, tells me that I need to kill the old site or Google will punish me in the search-engine wars. I’m a little concerned because the internal links still point to posts at the old site. But John assures me there’s a way of coverting all of the internal links in a relatively painless manner. After that, I’ll kill the old site.
Donna Morris
I like the photo! It typifies ‘Media Nation’.
Congratulations! I’ll be a regular visitor.
O-FISH-L
Change we can believe in!
Al
Dan: I just tried my first post at the ‘BZ sports station string, and have two questions. First, will there be a feature allowing the writer to edit a submission, and second, if no edit is available, will we have a preview which will allow us to catch errors before final submission?
Dan Kennedy
Hello, Al: The answer is that I don’t know the answer. The commenting functions looks to be pretty barebones, doesn’t it? I would like to offer something better. I can’t believe it’s not possible with WordPress, but I guess we’ll find out.
Ray Richard
Looks good!
Welcome to the smooth functioning of WordPress.
Be sure to add Askimet for spam prevention.
eeka
I actually really like the photo.
CAvard
Love the new look! Much better than the old one! Glad this is going to work out for you.
GreaterGrafton
Welcome to WordPress! This looks a lot less cluttered.
John Hall
Looks great, Dan. The graphic doesn’t bother me.
Neil
Dan, can you offer any specifics as to why you made this change? Easier to manage the templates? I do think the new site looks cleaner. I created a WordPress blog ages ago but didn’t do anything with it. It’s moribund like most blogs. Feels like a good time to resurrect it.
Ah, no comment preview, as Al noticed. Unprotected commenting! I usually have to fix my comments repeatedly as I don’t spel so good.
Dan Kennedy
Neil: I wanted to consolidate all my stuff on my own server. Blogger doesn’t let you set up static pages; WordPress does, and I’ve taken advantage of them. That was the biggest reason. Also: more reliable statistics; coolness factor (having a Blogger blog in 2009 is about as hip as having an AOL e-mail address); more flexibility if I want to make changes; and more information on commenters (a lot more!).
Finally, I’ve been using WordPress.com for class blogs, our church website, and our Boy Scout troop website, and had really gotten to like it. I’d have used that except that WP.com bans advertising. So I’m using WordPress.org on my own server instead.