Category: Geek Love

You guys thought I was kidding last week when I said I was working on my plans to take over the world, didn’t you? Well, I wasn’t. Nope, not at all.

World domination will now begin … Blogomania has partnered up with Moxie Design Studio to bring a little Moxie everywhere.

I am totally stoked about working with the Moxie Girls – Kathy and Joelle have been nothing but fabulous to work with, and I’m excited about working with Julie, Mel, Christina and Taughnee!

Holy crap though … Joelle didn’t say anything before about how I had to streak for initiation. Crap. Hopefully they will let me wear my tiara while I run.

By the way, nothing at Blogomania has changed; the doors are still open, no one is going anywhere. (Although I’m not offering design anymore – no time with hosting!) We’re just expanding things out into the world of Moxie!

I’m so excited – I’ve been bouncy around for a week now, waiting to share this with the world! Wheeeeeee!!! I’m officially a Moxie Girl!

Ben asked me earlier why he should use NewsGator Online over Bloglines. Hmmm. When I wrote my earlier post about NewsGator Online, I didn’t think of it as an “either or” sort of thing – I spotted NewsGator Online, I liked the clean interface (oh! Look! Pretty colors!) and I signed up – as “christine,” which is still pretty shocking. Then I wrote my first post about it.

Now I’ve had some more time to poke around and check things out. I like the interface that allows you to sort feeds into folders (I think it’s less clunky then bloglines.) I didn’t like how I had to hunt for the Bookmarklet to use to subscribe to feeds on the fly. However, I think I just found the coolest part of NewsGator…

You can sync with all the different options, including FeedDemon. Read feeds here, read feeds there, sync up. If you used their NewsGator for Outlook version (a fee service) along with the online system, you could sync up what you had read. Even better though, FeedDemon can sync with your NewsGator Online subscription.

I took a long time to warm up to Bloglines because I generally hesitate to use online services for things like that. I worry about what will happen when they go down – I’ll be stuck high and dry without my feeds. For a long time, I stuck with my desktop feed reader, and my only issue with it was if I read something on one computer, it was still marked as unread on my other computer. Blech. Who wants to double read?

So if you use FeedDemon on your desktop along with a NewsGator Online subscription – you don’t have to worry about that any more. Just sync them up. How great is that?

If I had known about this a month ago, I would have skipped over Bloglines. This solution meets every need I had – and then some. But I’ll save that gem for another day. (Sign up for your own NewsGator Online account and see if you can figure it out!)

(Pssst… wondering what the heck RSS even is? Learn more. Read blogs, news, and content easier. Have a MT v2.6x powered blog and an RSS feed? How about a full post feed? (Excerpts are annoying, if you ask me.) Get a better template for your blog.)

I can always tell when I’ve found a service that is fairly new. I try to sign up with a username of “christine,” chuckling as I think, “yeah, RIGHT. Christine is *so* not going to be available. But it’s worth a shot…”

NewsGator Online is so new, I just signed up as “christine.” That new. Want an alternative to Bloglines? Want to read all of your RSS feeds in one place, no matter where you are at? Want a nice and pretty interface for reading your feeds? Check NewsGator Online out. It rocks!

Search the WWW Search BigPinkCookie.com

I’m testing out the Google search feature. I tried to go in to WP to add it to my sidebar; after I ripped out a few fists full of hair, I decided to just add it to a post. I’ll deal with where it goes in the final design later. I just want to make sure I have search across my full site. I’ll need it, since this is my virtual brain dump of all sorts of information! It is a temporary fix while I get the “new” site up and running in MT, leaving all of my old posts behind in WordPress. At least with the Google “search this site” feature, I can still find it all!

Now I think I’ll have to make a BigPinkCookie logo that is Google-like to use. Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if the results page had “BigPinkCoooooooooooookie” like Google does? *giggle* It’s not there, but the search tool is still fun to use. Try it out!

I’ve looked at the options for exporting my blog from WordPress and back in to MT (PapaScott’s Export from WordPress and Carthik’s option) and … well, there is one problem. I have a LOT of posts. I mean, a LOT. Like 6000 posts or some crazy number like that. I’m afraid that the options out there will cause my server to seize up in to a coughing, wheezing ball if I try to run either of them. The load would be just to much to bear, and would probably fall apart somewhere in the middle.

I just don’t see a good solution.

Would it be wrong of me to just start fresh? To point people to the old site if they want to run a search? Or better yet, to test out something like the Google “search within this site” option to allow people to search both the MT and WP versions of my site?

I hate to lose the history. I would include the old archives in my archive page somehow. But moving data around just doesn’t seem to make sense, and it is the only roadblock in my move back to MT.

So is it wrong to start fresh? Or should I just go for it? I’m asking you guys because you’re more likely to look at old archives than I am. If I need something, I just go to Google. (They seem to index all of my posts there anyways!) So, what do you think? Your opinion matters!