Why Did I Move My Blog

2010 April 12
by CajoleJuice

There is purposefully no question mark, ladies and gentleman. It’s a statement of exasperation.

This blog, The Somewhat Manly Nerd, was originally just another WordPress.com blog. As you can tell by the archives, I started it about three and half years ago (Fuck).

About two years ago, I bought the somewhatmanlynerd.com domain from GoDaddy. But then I didn’t do anything with it for a year. I should have been telling people to go to that URL, while having it redirect to my thesomewhatmanlynerd.wordpress.com blog. Instead, I paid 10 bucks for that first year and did nothing with it. By this time, I was getting about 400 hits a day on the blog. Not too many commenters, but certainly more than I’ve gotten since I moved to self-hosting.

So after that first year of wasting my lame domain, Dreamhost had some deal for four years of hosting for 200 bucks. I figured it was a decent enough time to jump in, if only to have somewhere to host all my GIFs in one place without having to worry about going over my Photobucket bandwidth limit. And I also had wanted to move my blog to self-hosting for a while. I guess the reasons ranged from possibly wanting to put an ad somewhere just for curiosity’s sake, to not liking any of the themes on WordPress.com, to wanting to be able to use Javascript on my blog.

Moving my blog over to my new webspace about a year ago has resulted in this creation, and I’m almost as proud of it as the awesome putt I made on a practice green today. A few dozen people read it and a handful of them occasionally comment. But it is kinda maddening that the old version still gets twice the traffic after not being updated in over a year. I shouldn’t have moved in the first place. I gave up 400 hits a day! Now I’m lucky if I get that in a week. And I guess pride does factor into it, but I also just miss having massive comment threads like the one I got on this Bear Grylls post; I like creating discussion with my blog, even if it’s moronic discussion.

And then I see that WordPress.com now has the very theme I’m using, and on top of that it’s being used by an e-friend of mine on her blog Baby Got Books. She was no doubt inspired by me, which is flattering, but it also makes me want to move back. But then I’d have to give up my nice looking polls, and my Featured Content Gallery, and my embedded Hulu videos. It’s too much to sacrifice.

I remember I also thought about moving to Tumblr, just because people seem very big on reposting stuff from other Tumblr blogs and following people and all that community crap. But that crap allows people to build up readership. I stayed away from Tumblr because I thought every possible theme looked like crap, but I guess there is quite a bit you can do, as evidenced by this Tumblr creation from another e-buddy, How To Kidnap A Supermodel. If only Tumblr allowed massive GIFs, I would have an awesome Tumblr just for them.

I need to move to a new paragraph, because I’ve hit the limit for the word “Tumblr” contained in one. It does hit that balance between blogging and Twitter. Maybe I’ll try to make some more awful movie charts and make a Tumblr just for them.

And this is another shitty, boring blog post that I’m going to end now. I apologize to anyone subscribed to me waking up this Monday morning. Not a good way to start your week.

Related posts:

  1. Obligatory Post About the Blog Move
  2. Remember When I Used To Update This Blog?
  3. YES MY BLOG IS WORKING AGAIN

  • cusehoops

    Yo … I used to read your stuff a long, long time ago on livejournal … think I was just looking at random, recently updated posts and found your journal … then I IM’d you and you and your friends freaked out, hahaha.

    And how about those Mets? Can barely keep my eyes open this morning, but damn, I’m happy.

    • http://somewhatmanlynerd.com/blog CajoleJuice

      I do remember the nick, but not the IMing. Well, I hope you enjoy this blog almost as much?

      But yeah, the Mets are just beasts at home this year.

      (I edited your comment because I like to keep that type of stuff off here.)