Continuing on from my earlier entry, I've divided these chronicles because there's just so much to go on.

I'm also sorry that permalinks from my old blog are broken. I'm going to retroactively fix sore spots that come up on an as-needed basis.

I've also got a boatload of plugins, but I'm going to get into them gracefully, because the last thing I want to do is cruft my new WordPress blog up! (Behind-the-scenes, I'm going to do a clean sweep of unused themes.)

Further reasoning: in my day job as a Community Developer at Linden Lab, we use WordPress for our Official Linden Blog. Since I'm a co-admin and spend so much time on it, in the best interest of a person's overall applicable knowledge to situations, it makes sense that whatever I learn while using WP in my personal life can also apply to my work life. Which leads to greater cohension and enjoyability, instead of grappling with differences that can't be carried over so clearly.

Just in the last few days, I've learned a lot about CSS! Whew.

Speaking of, the theme I've chosen is the wonderful Tiga, which I found out about after browsing through hundreds of themes. I also contacted several design studios and asked for help with my watermelon-flavored blog, but for time and budget, I stuck to my own guns. It's a good first step. I've of course extensively modified Tiga to reflect my personality.

I've also just turned on gravatars, and it's a shame they're having difficulties, because my very old logo is still stuck! But at least we can have some pretty little pictures to go with my commenters.

This actually isn't the first time I looked at WordPress: I had formerly looked at it back in '05, but several missing goodies which later became available, like widgets (providing easily-arrangable modules which were already sort of present in Blog-City back then) put me off. The time is right now.

I also looked around at several hosting plans, and got some most gracious help from WebbleYou (note the colors), but ultimately decided to go with DreamHost. There wasn't a single major webhost I didn't see mixed reviews on, but the price — that 9999 discount code is still active! — their offered capacities, and their most excellent company blog (OMGZ PICCIES!) as a reflection on themselves helped convince me. And yeah, they use WordPress for their blog too.

Continuing onwards, I can't help getting started with Categories to better sort my posts. I took a brief glance at my 1,000+ previous entries, and that scared me off, so I don't think I'll be going through each and every one and retagging, as I don't have that luxury of time. Instead, like fixing permalinks, I'll edit them on an as-needed basis. I also changed the default "Uncategorized" to "Second Life" since that's what the overwhelming majority of posts here are about.

*pushes button to create Blog Improvements category, just like the Official Linden Blog's… hee hee!*

Next up in the "Anatomy of a Blog Move" series, I'll describe some of the pitfalls I encountered.