It kind of makes sense to me that on the one year anniversary of my first post for the ETechLib blog that I move the blog to a new home. This is it!
ETechLib: http://etechlib.wordpress.com/
I started looking into moving my blog way back when I had the Twitter blackout last summer. I wanted a place that would accept a daily Twitter dump as a blogpost (which I’m still figuring out), and MBlog (based on Movable Type) wouldn’t do it. I am sure there are flavors of Movable Type that do, but our local installation has a lot of stuff it doesn’t do.
Other things it wouldn’t do easily included a blogroll, stuffing widgets in the side panel, and generally making it a customized personable homey space for your thoughts. It isn’t that you couldn’t do it, but it was time consuming and required pretty sophisticated CSS skills. I probably could have done it, but it would have taken time that I wanted to spend in other ways, and I resented being put in a position of doing something the hard way when it is easy in other spaces.
Thus you find me here. Not to say that WordPress is perfect either. Once I moved the backfiles over, I found it messed with the layout of the posts. Little by little I am working to fix that. More important I found that WordPress.com blocks most embeds.
As Emerging Technologies Librarian, I am often trying to show off neat stuff that is relatively new. No can do. Movable Type let me do that. I spent a goodly chunk of time trying to work out this problem. There are a few solutions.
1. Pay money to make my own WordPress installation on my own domain, or try to get someone else to do so.
2. Live with it, and don’t post embeds that WordPress doesn’t like (most of them).
3. Live with it, say whatever I want to say, and if WordPress doesn’t let me post the embed, for that post have a clone at the old blog site.
4. Find a different platform.
The simplest solution is #1, but I am a single mom who just put off a couple plumbing repairs because I didn’t have ready cash, and I don’t think that right now I’ll be putting personal funds into a job-related blog.
#2 just isn’t acceptable to me. It would work for other topics that are mostly just talking about ideas, maybe with a few pictures or YouTube videos thrown in, but not for what I am doing.
#3 is what I’ll be actually doing for now. Yes, it is a really clunky awkward fix. Still, it allows me to have one primary space for my blog, put everything there, and still provide outbound links to other things I want to show you. My apologies in advance.
#4? Yeah, you bet. I’ll be watching, testing, trying things out. After all, that’s what I do. 
And in the meantime, it isn’t as if there are NO advantages to being on WordPress. 
