Last December, as I was about to write my Christmas post, I realized I had run out of storage. I got out my credit card and paid for extra storage to Radio Userland and the code they sent would not work. I wrote to sales, and customer service and it took about twelve days before someone got back to me and gave me the right code.
As you can imagine, the experience was unnerving. I had resisted moving my blog even if I knew the software was obsolete, because I like the idea of my site being in a single place, it is a permanent database of things that have happened in Venezuela in the last six and a half years. When I mentioned this, Dean suggested he could find some Chinese students that could help me migrate the whole thing at a reasonable cost. At least three readers were generous enough to offer to host it for free in their servers. Thank you all for your offers to give me a hand.
But they key push came from Omar, who wrote that while there is no migration path from Radio Userland directly to WordPress, there is a migration from Userland to LiveJournal and another from LiveJournal to WordPress. And indeed there was, so I began learning my way around WordPress and the first free weekend I had, I moved all of the six and a half years to WordPress and have actually been running the Devil in parallel at https://devilsexcrement.wordpress.com. In fact, I have been posting first at the new site and then later just copying and pasting into the old one.
There are some differences. In Userland I had many categories that could be sort of independent blogs, like my orchids page, where I post my pictures there and, but they don’t appear in the main sections. I can not do the same thing in WordPress, so that I will probably keep posting those pictures in the old blog.
I was not able to move the comments, maybe there is a way, I just don’t know how to do it.
I was planning to announce this next week after the referendum, but then I realized that posts go on the air very fast with wordpress and this will be an advantage on Sunday when people check eagerly for any news.
Thus, I will continue posting in both systems for a few months, it is not much of an effort. Sometimes next week I will redirect the domains devilexcrement.com and devilsexcremnet.com to the wordpress site.
I am not finished with the new site. It has been a lot of work to migrate everything and make it look good, but wordpress does not use html but CSS and I don’t know much about CSS. So, if any reader knows enough CSS, maybe they can give me a hand in inserting a picture in the heading of the new blog and posting the blog award box on the left side. I would really appreciate it.
In the meantime thanks for reading me and if you want to see the posts faster move to the wodpress site and if there is something you don’t like about the new look, let me know, I may be able to change it. I will let you know in a few months when I stop posting in the old site with the old software
The Devil's Excrement 